Franciscans Commemorative Park

The Franciscan Memorial Park is built on the traces of the former Franciscan estate, boulevard René-Lévesque, which burned down in 2010 and whose remains and foundations were completely removed from the site. Located in the Grands Jardins neighborhood, just steps from the garden of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the park’s primary civic purpose was to commemorate the historical presence of the Franciscans through an evocative and sensitive landscape design.

Unlike common commemoration approaches that evoke the foundations of a lost heritage, the approach here is inspired by photographs of the interior of the former chapel, with its vaulted ceiling, delicate cross-shaped columns, and the detail of the rosettes at the junction of the columns and the ceiling. Projecting this aerial composition onto the ground, the concept substitutes the physicality of ruin for a more intangible figure, in keeping with a building that only exists in images and memories. Outlined onto the ground, the rib vault and rosettes create a unique pattern made up of diagonals and points. The unusual geometry is supported by paved surfaces, insertions of lines and circles and large planted beds. The figure takes on an abstract dimension which blurs the historical reference. The bell, the only remnant recovered and preserved from the lost chapel, is placed at the entrance to the site as an artifact in counterpoint to the formal and material abstraction.