City and gardens meet in Montreal

To celebrate the 375th anniversary of Montreal, Canada, the Métis gardens moved a historical metro wagon built in 1967 to the gardens to create the first-ever Grand-Métis Station, the easternmost terminus of the Montreal metro, facilitating sustainable access to the famous gardens on the St. Laurence river.


Our readers will remember the “Jardins de Métis” as the location for the International Garden Festival, the leading contemporary garden festival in North America (link).
For Montreal, the year 2017 looks to be particularly packed with culture because it has some major anniversaries to celebrate. First of all, the city's 375th anniversary, then the 150th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Expo - and therefore for the MR-63 metro wagon, designed and built for Expo 67 by Montreal's transport company - and the anniversary of the death of Elsie Reford, the creator of Jardins de Métis and co-founder of Canadian Women's Club of Montreal, which is celebrating its 110th anniversary.
All the more reason to do something new and iconic to celebrate these anniversaries. The original 1967 wagons are now making way for new ones, and the Montreal transport company (STM) launched a call for proposals to celebrate these icons of industrial design to the advantage of the community.
The project by Le Bocal, creative laboratory of Quebec-based  ABCP Architecture convinced STM because it proposed installing one the MR-63 wagons at the entrance to the Jardins de Métis, in the Linear Garden whose configuration and dimensions curiously recall those of Montreal's metro stations.
The result is a perfect integration of public gardens and public transport, to the advantage of the community that can now take the metro directly to the Jardins de Métis that also adds to its sustainable use.

Christiane Bürklein

Project: Le Bocal
Location: Jardins de Métis, Montréal, Canada
Year: 2017
Images: © Sylvain Legris
Find out more: http://jardinsdemetis.com/
Thanks to v2com