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Humaniti
By : Lemay
GRANDS PRIX DU DESIGN – 16th edition
Discipline : Landscape & Territories : Grand Winner
Categories : Landscaping / Terrace & Landscaping for Commercial and Office Project : Platinum Winner
The smart vertical community and multifunctional complex of Montreal’s Humaniti reflects the city’s rich aesthetics, diversity and energy with purposeful architecture. Part of the uniquely H-shaped structure’s city-within-a-city concept lies in its intermingling of private and public spaces, a facet which the landscape architecture accomplishes through the spaces it creates to heighten the complex’s relationship with urban life.
At the foot of the structure, landscape forms the basis on which onlookers can fully experience this project’s dramatic presence, creating a visual and tactile link to its surrounding streetscape through its public plaza. Set below a massive archway which stitches Humaniti together, this plaza is an unconventional creation of public space that creates as much room for quiet contemplation as it does social encounters, complementing the collectivity and community found inside the building.
An extension of the magnificent Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle, the plaza thoughtfully acts on the project’s human, district and metropolitan scales through art, nature and recreational pursuits: Standing tall at the entrance of the plaza Marc Séguin’s H Anima sculpture, set below a thin veil of water; a reverent nod to the work of Jean-Paul-Riopelle and an expression of the natural world’s omnipresence, the piece is richly augmented by curated vegetation through the centre of the plaza, echoed in the public and private terrasses on upper floors. The fractal detailing on the ground of the plaza and drop-off reaches upward and is echoed in the building’s façade, in a play of shapes on the entrance to the complex and an expression of users’ diverging and converging reasons to be here, their arrivals and departures, and the interconnectedness found between.
A celebration of Montreal’s distinct cultural and social character, Humaniti’s landscape enhances this is combination of the first place of home, the second place of work, and American urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s third place of society, engagement, and placemaking.
Collaboration
