It is a suspended ring of 50,000 pounds (about 22 tons), signed Claude Cormier, which will crown the work of the esplanade of Place Ville Marie, launched in 2017 by Ivanhoé Cambridge, owner of the building.
The stainless steel ring, 30 meters in diameter, will occupy the space contained between addresses 3 and 4 of Place Ville Marie. Everything will be illuminated in the evening starting in the fall.
The Ivanhoé Cambridge team has announced that the esplanade will host shows this summer.
The ring of the Place Ville Marie esplanade is intended as a gateway to the city centre. Its designer, Claude Cormier, likes to include it in a series of landmarks in the history of Montreal, with the views it frames of Mount Royal Park and the Royal Victoria Hospital, as well as the Avenue McGill College, which has just been redesigned and will be pedestrianized.
“We decided to create a lens to allow us to see and highlight the visual perspective,” says Claude Cormier, to whom we owe 18 shades of gaythe row of colored balls suspended above Sainte-Catherine Street.
Wishes for continuity and accessibility
The ring will therefore be suspended above the staircase, which had in fact been planned when Place Ville Marie was created, but which had never been built. “This opening was included in the plan,” continues Claude Cormier. The staircase will thus complete the gesture initiated in the 1960s.
Despite the effects of the pandemic on traffic in the city center, Ivanhoé Cambridge wishes to open these spaces to the entire population, and not only to people who work at Place Ville Marie. The investor also wants to make these workplaces an “essential and relevant” site. “We wondered how to make the offices interesting, not just for the tenants, but for the employees who work there,” says Annik Desmarteau, vice-president of offices in Quebec at Ivanhoé Cambridge.
The installation of this final ring comes as Place Ville Marie celebrates its 60and anniversary.