The Architecture Review

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. 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 selfrusting steel, it forms a canopy threaded through the forest.