© Olivier Blouin
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Unchanged for more than a century, the National Assembly of Québec inaugurated, last May, its new reception pavilion, designed by Provencher_Roy, a multidisciplinary firm integrating services in architecture, design, urban planning and landscaping, in consortium with GLCRM Architectes, as part of an initiative to modernize the institution’s infrastructures and facilitate access for the general public. The project garnered a first merit award as early on as the conceptual phase in 2016, at the 49th edition of the Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence. Today, the fully realized project embodies a thorough understanding and mastery of heritage issues and shows great care and attention paid to an exceptional site.
The intervention required special reflection because of the quality and the history of the place, which is absolutely exceptional in Québec. The facade of the Parliament Building, one of the rare facades in the world to depict such an iconographic narrative, constitutes the starting point of the architectural process, its classic French character and its symmetry permeating the entire project. The new pavilion is inserted on either side of the central axis that aligns the main entrance and the Parliament gardens, and is completely concealed when viewing the heritage building from the front.
"Provencher_Roy opted for a sensitive and completely integrated intervention, by sliding the entire pavilion beneath the existing landscape and using the monumental staircase to establish a new entrance, to the pavilion itself and to the Parliament’s spaces,”
- Claude Provencher
(Architect and senior partner at Provencher_Roy, the firm he co-founded)
All masonry elements of the staircase were dismantled piece by piece, stored and later reassembled identically, and the National Assembly’s frontage was excavated down to the building’s foundations in order to install the new programs—a bold intervention made possible by the Assembly’s solid construction on bedrock, dating back to 1886. The historic facade of the Parliament Building remains visible along its full height and maintains direct links to the gardens. At its base, the deployment of glazing on either side of an oculus signals the intervention, more so at twilight. Visitors are thereby invited to get close to the facade as they enter the reception pavilion.
