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Centre de glaces Intact Assurance
By : Lemay & Ardoises Architecture
GRANDS PRIX DU DESIGN – 15th edition
Discipline : Architecture
Categories : Public Building / Sports & Leisure Building : Platinum Winner, Gold Certification
Located on the site of the former Gaétan Boucher outdoor ice ring and annexed to the Centre sportif de Sainte-Foy, the Centre de Glaces de Québec required a sensitive approach that would promote community appropriation and user comfort. The first 400-metre indoor ice ring in Quebec, it is also home to two Olympic-sized rinks for short-track speed skating, figure skating and hockey, all surrounded by a 465-metre athletic track with three lanes.To promote openness between the centre’s users and the outside world, the volume surrounding the ice was raised to create a 360-degree window. With this gesture, the form follows both the structure’s and the site’s functions. Its exterior is on the scale of an adjacent highway, while its interior is on that of the individual. Calm yet confident, as the richness of the interior speaks for itself, the exterior embraces a nordicity of place, reflected in surface of the ice: The building’s shape evokes its use, transposing the speed, dynamism, balance, and fluidity of the skater. Seen from afar, the centre slowly reveals itself to motorists through the embankments on the site, a landscape that creates a natural screen between building and highway, the shape of which is in turn echoed in the envelope. Inside, the ring integrates a multimedia banner which conceals the building’s inner mechanics while lifting the bleachers. Covered with wood, this gesture helps to maintain the project’s human scale and directs one’s gaze towards the exterior. Within these delicate spaces, each detail is exacted to pay homage to a magnificent sport where, for the first time, skaters are at the heart of the landscape and protected by a delicately floating ring.
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