Matter in transformation
Rio Tinto Planetarium, Montreal
The new Planetarium is a material in transformation, attracting sunlight like a sensor that absorbs its energy to use it, recover it and transform it.
Suspended between two universes: one, on a large scale, that of space and the stars, and the other, closer to the earth, to man and matter, stands the future Planetarium. It transports us elsewhere and invites us to discover a snapshot of evolution, an allegory of the formation of matter, a change of state from raw to precious. In a frozen time, neither present nor future, the angular matter in transformation, perforated, altered is a symbol of this perpetual mutation.
Inspired by this material, the whole project presents to the visitors the different states of this one, the transformations lived by the planets are then in the heart of the visit. This material allows visitors to live a sensitive and emotional immersive experience and at the same time understand astronomical phenomena.
The material in transformation detached from the ground creates the interior space and conceals in its thickness all the vital technical and structural elements of the new building. It also houses the devices necessary for the implementation of various productions throughout the Planetarium. In its lifting, it also reveals the main elements of the museology.
The entrance hall opens onto the hall of the pas perdus and invites the visitor to engage in a journey of discovery and learning. The reflective surfaces allow the space to be multiplied by creating illusions of infinity.
A sun is at the heart of this galaxy, the theater no 2. The light that radiates from it creates a signal visible from the avenue Pierre de Coubertin and in the heart of the Planetarium, it directs the gestures that organize the project. The public spaces of the Hall place the visitor at the heart of this system, immersing him in a universe of discovery, contemplation and knowledge.
Atmosphere
The curtain of light
Humans who have looked at the sky since the dawn of time have generally perceived only a crystalline vault on the surface of which their gaze naturally stopped. This is how we simply drew, by linking together the brightest stars in the sky, the constellations that furnish this two-dimensional celestial picture. It is still this same vision of an apparently depthless reality that most people still spontaneously associate with the celestial world.
But for astronomers, the celestial vault is only the visual skin of the universe. For them, each point of light that pierces the sky is actually a tunnel of light through which we can access worlds that would otherwise be completely beyond our reach and understanding. The starry sky thus becomes a stage curtain where each grain of light pierces the darkness in the direction of cosmological objects that spread out almost infinitely in space and time.
It is this strong image of curtains pierced by light that will serve as the basic concept for the elaboration of the visitor's experience and for the scenarization of the interior spaces of the new Montreal Planetarium.
It is thus by crossing successive curtains of light that visitors will progress from one museographic space to another and that they will advance more and more deeply into the cosmological universe. It will soon become clear that in astronomy, visual appearance is often directly related to distance. In fact, whatever its real size, any cosmological object has essentially the appearance of a simple point more or less luminous when viewed from a distance.
During their visit, visitors will be constantly immersed in an environment where the more or less diffuse matter will essentially take the form of shining points, holes opening towards new spaces or more or less spherical objects with ambiguous dimensions and undefined materiality that will be suspended here and there in the immediate or distant space. This architectural and scenographic allegory corresponds quite well to the realities of the physical world, as it exists at different scales. In fact, it is essentially blisters, depressions and other local irregularities of the fabric of space-time that constitute the very matter of the physical world, in the infinitely large as well as in the infinitely small.
This evocative spatial environment will be omnipresent throughout the exhibition space, which it will characterize in a strong and coherent way. The geometry of this exhibition space has been designed taking into account the thematic progression of the elements that will be presented. Thus, visitors will progressively move from the world of the planets of our solar system to that of the galaxies and stars, and then to the more exotic world of cosmology and the history of the Universe.
The first curtain of light that visitors will enter will essentially look like a starry sky. As you dive in, you will notice that some points move, while others scrupulously maintain their same position in the procession of stars. These moving stars are actually planets whose true nature will be revealed as they get closer. Thus, we will first explore the world of planets from the image that we have every day when looking at the sky, that is to say that of a simple luminous point. We will then explore the more distant planets before continuing the adventure towards other astronomical discoveries.
This first area, the planets, will be slightly wider than it is deep so that its front is large enough to illustrate the surface of the starry sky that serves as a starting point for the visit. It then narrows slightly before leading to the second zone, that of the stars and galaxies. These two zones will be separated by another curtain of light that will serve both as a background for the first zone and as an entry point for the next. Such a curtain also allows to partially hide the museographic elements of the next zone and to avoid attracting visitors before they have adequately explored the first zone.
This second curtain of light will open onto the universe of galaxies. Once again, it is the growing power of astronomical observation instruments that revealed to us, not so long ago, that what we thought was just a banal star is sometimes in reality a majestic procession of hundreds of billions of stars slowly turning on itself. By entering a galaxy as if in a tremendous gust of light, visitors will become aware of the countless number of stars that evolve in it. They will also discover the great diversity of their structures and their fates. They will also learn how stars are born in the heart of nebulae whose contractions are expressed in terms of plasmas, X-rays and other gigantic expulsions of matter and energy. They will see how the birth of stars also gives birth to planets similar to ours and which seem to exist more and more everywhere in the Universe.
By crossing the third curtain of light, we will enter a new space whose shape will be much more elongated than that of the two previous zones. This configuration translates well the theme of this zone which is cosmology. At this scale, everything lengthens, time is counted in billions of years and space is measured in billions of light years. The curtain of light is gradually becoming a tunnel dotted with cosmological wonders and pierced by windows (wormholes) that open onto worlds that defy the imagination. In fact, the road is long to go back against the current of time to the first moment of the birth of the Universe, to the zero point of the Big Bang. The visit of this last zone will end by crossing another curtain of light which will be completely different from the previous ones and will illustrate in a more specific way the great explosion which accompanied the birth of our Universe.
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
Strengths:
The jury mentions the very convincing quality of the presentation and the team.
The party proposes a combination of forms from the surrounding built context, respecting the desired visual axes.
The formal resolution of the exterior envelope provides an easily identifiable identity for the Planetarium.
The planning of the first floor proposes a good organizational resolution, including the café.
Weaknesses:
The evolution of the design in Stage 2 did not incorporate Stage 1 jury comments, including the justification for the roof/ceiling space; the size of the space in the inter-ceiling is unjustified.
The tour route provides little variety of experiences for the visitor.
LEED strategies appear to be superimposed on the project, without integration with the architectural design.
The project is too compact and compresses the public spaces.
The symbolism generated by the massing is underdeveloped and seems to be fixed at the first level.
(From jury report)
(Unofficial automated translation)
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