The controversy and disagreements often surrounding design competitions almost make us forget that competitions are an opportunity to examine a particular problematic that affects environment, innovation and heritage issues in equal measure: the architectural judgment. While the competition process is surely the most democratic way to grant contracts, the judgment process and evaluation of the projects remain to this day puzzling and downright incomprehensible. In 2010, the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Cultural Centre (Montréal) competition organizers made the bold choice to open one phase of the judgment to the general public. [...] more

Literature houses, be they European or anywhere else in the world, have received writers-in-residence since the 19th century. In order to confirm that Québec City as a showplace for literary creation, the Canadian Institute of Québec oriented itself towards a new programmatic type, the first in Canada, inspired by similar institutions that have recently opened their doors (Oslo in 2007, Geneva in 2012). The concept of the digital age is explained using an obscure but enlightening analogy: “a place that is to literature what a library is to reading”. The literature house of the 21st century is oriented towards both memory and creation, and combines the writers' residences with public spaces that can accommodate events and expositions around literature that is written and read on digital mediums. As detailed in the program, the literature house is a “ unique and always surprising” place that should provoke a feeling of “jamais vu” within the user. [...] more

Since the year 2000, more than fifteen architectural competitions aimed at rethinking libraries have been organized in Quebec. The recent Gabrielle-Roy library competition is a perfect example of this desire to change institutions dedicated to knowledge. Architecturally, it questions the contemporary trend towards dematerialization, which has been particularly explicit here due to the formal and massive architectural expression of the old library designed by Gauthier Guité Roy decades earlier. It also questions the paradoxical desire to create spaces that are well adapted to specific uses while being very flexible and versatile. [...] more