Winding through the woods: to celebrate the cultures of the aboriginal peoples of Quebec and the natural landscapes in which they evolved, this pavilion in the Montreal Botanical Garden evocatively enhances and responds to the woods in which it is set

Designed as a permanent commemoration of the great peace of Montreal negotiated by the French and the aboriginal people in 1701, the First Nations Garden Pavilion in that city's Botanical Gardens creates a place where visitors can learn about the cultures of Quebec's 11 aboriginal nations and a venue for sharing First Nation wisdom.

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Confronted with the problem of designing a building for a diverse group of people whose existence was traditionally focused on the natural landscape, the architects chose first to study the land. Working with the aboriginal communities, they selected a site along a path in the Botanical Gardens that marks the boundary between two forests--one a conifer forest that was the ancestral home of groups including the Naskapi, Cree, Innu and Algonquin and a second, made up of deciduous trees, where the Micmac, Malecite, Abenaki and others had traditionally lived. Seeking to develop a scheme that captured the significance of this route and boundary while retaining existing trees, a long, thin ribbon of space defined by a roof was envisaged as a casting of the path. Warped to acknowledge land contours and the bed of an existing stream, this roof was cast in concrete and lifted high into the trees. Supported on slender randomly distributed columns of self-rusting steel, it forms a canopy threaded through the forest.

The new pavilion provides exhibition spaces with a conservation workshop, offices, storage, shop and small meeting room for educational programmes. To minimize the impact of this building in the landscape, museum workspaces and storage are below ground and the other public spaces grouped in two small blocks at each end of the canopy. The shop is housed within a light glassy pavilion above the museum workspaces. Screened with a mat of lashed tree branches that provide shading along the south-west facade, it merges with the surrounding forest and exploits the ambiguity of inside and out. At the opposite end, a meeting room is made with walls of rough shuttered concrete and self-rusting steel--materials that successfully embed it in the ground. These moves reduce the apparent bulk of the new building and leave the wisp-like canopy as the scheme's predominant element.

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The museum exhibits are planned in a series of large free-standing glass vitrines placed along the path and sheltered by the undulating canopy. Emphasizing the importance of the land, the designers have focused the exhibits on the raw plant materials from which everyday objects such as baskets, hats, toys and other household objects were traditionally made. These are collected to create an outdoor display that is beautifully organized, clearly legible and carefully lighted. A birch bark canoe, up-ended and set against a translucent screen of birch bark, is viewed against the backdrop of the forest, alongside displays of other significant examples of everyday objects juxtaposed with screens of cranberries, twigs and cones sandwiched between sheets of glass.

By carefully scrutinizing the form of the land and considering its particular significance to the First Nations' people of the region, this new pavilion radically transforms the programme of the building to create an educational focus and a distinct place in a fragment of forest at the heart of the city.

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COPYRIGHT 2004 EMAP Architecture
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group