Montreal, Quebec

2016

Located in the former Royal Bank at 360 rue Saint-Jacques in Montreal, the Crew offices are a 12,000 square foot project for a new high-tech company and their new café. Two design challenges presented themselves: undertaking architectural solutions to establish limits between the different uses of the Crew company, and defining an architectural approach to questioning the relationship between contemporary integration and the heritage building.

The complexity of the program is manifested in the cohabitation between three types of office areas: those of Crew for permanent employees, those which are rented by the month or week, and those available by the day or for a few hours. These three developments are linked to the Café. This idea of creating a sharing space allows meetings between workers, which can lead to promising professional relationships.

It is these relationships and possibilities that needed to be translated into architecture. Everything takes shape thanks to divisions of all kinds: glass partitions, virtual borders, or even more concrete elements, such as the conference rooms which divide the permanent employees' café at the back.

It is also these existing heritage elements which presented a real architectural opportunity.

This remarkable shell containing vestiges of all kinds, demonstrating the talent of the artisans of the time, is now recycled. Facing this rich presence of details, the new project must establish a relationship between the ancient and the contemporary. It's about intervening discreetly, resurrecting this place with a new use, a new life, which takes shape through simple and spare gestures.

The new project is discreet and is perceived in the background, only once the character of this existing interior is appreciated. It is about creating a secondary gesture, which nevertheless gives identity to the new use of office spaces and the café.