Red Bird artist studio – Montreal

“A recent experience with the quality of the built environment goes back to last spring when I visited the Red Bird artist studio, located at 135 Van Horne Avenue in Montreal. This is an industrial building reinvested as a shared space where artists from all walks of life rub shoulders. Far from constituting a unique scenario of appropriation of Montreal’s industrial buildings, this experience also testifies to impressions generalized to the visit of several such cases.

Here, spontaneous planning and constructive experimentation reign, and intuition is the modus operandi. The regular and functional framework of the hangars is bent to transform the face of the building from top to bottom. Spatial strategies are dictated by means and needs, punctuated here and there by a diversity of disparate and unusual objects that end up really defining the space when they manage to pass the test of time. Every turn is an open border between spaces of completely different use and character. To the outsider’s eye, the canvas walls are open books, the wide winding corridors tell their story and unwillingly expose their artifacts as witnesses to their origin. Even if deserted, the space is inhabited by a resolutely sensitive presence that the best planners struggle to reproduce. It is a perceptible climate, almost corporeal, which although tangible remains elusive. Since then, I often try to understand why only certain spaces emanate such substance. It would seem too simple to assert that the occupation alone has revealed the quality of this a priori inhospitable place. If the interest of a space lies in its content rather than its container, what is the point of designing? Should we try to seize this presence in order to reproduce it, is it possible to do so? Would it be forcing the hand to the freedom to occupy? It is perhaps what we call the force of things.” (Booklet Positive Lived Experiences of Quality in the Built Environment 2023, p.84).

Google map link: https://goo.gl/maps/LPrTTHm6Kah4DniV6