The new Municipal Library of Châteauguay is located in the city’s civic park, adding to the existing core of municipal services provided on site. Upon its landscape of green dunes, the new Municipal Library appears as the city’s ‘’standing stone’’. Symbolically, the library‘s fieldstone cabinet of books levitates above the landscape and provides a new gateway for the park. The program of the library is structured vertically in two main strata. The ground floor is conceived as a fluid ‘public place’ in continuity with the natural grades of the landscape, while the library proper is housed on the above two floors. The new Library gives access to more than 150,000 documents, including periodicals, reference and audio-visual material.

The Bibliothèque Municipale de Chateauguay appears as a villa in the landscape. By that I mean that it manages to address and invite its surroundings with the ability of a smaller structure: The park climbs over a multipurpose room and turns its roof into a piece of nature. A similar work of continuity occurs on a programmatic level, where the classical idea of a promenade architecturale is revisited by the injection of diagonal visual relationships, thickening the overall richness of the building. I particularly appreciated the sobriety yet clarity of the material choices as well as the economy of ornaments. The raw esthetic contributes to focusing the means towards practical/active effects rather than stylistic waste.
Julien de Smedt