Montreal is a city of outdoor stairs. While the Quebec metropolis is among the coldest major cities on the continent, its urban fabric is characterized by the romantic — though often icy — swoops, stoops and spirals of innumerable escaliers. Today, they are an iconic part of the city’s architectural heritage, and a fixture of whimsical postcard views. Their origins, however, are decidedly more prosaic.
During the city’s late 19th century population boom, the municipal building code mandated a modest setback for new residential buildings. A reflection of the era’s prevailing urban philosophies — namely the City Beautiful and Garden City movements — the civic authorities envisioned a green ribbon along the sidewalks. For builders and developers, it translated to a familiar logistical challenge: How to meet code while maximizing livable floor area? Then, as now, the built form emerged as a negotiation of regulatory constraints and socio-economic realities. The quickest and cheapest way to accomodate setbacks was to place circulation and egress along the exterior of the building, resulting in a varying typology of “plexes” fronted by winding stairs.
While the built fabric that emerged was (likely) an unintended consequence of the building code, it nonetheless meaningfully shaped urban life. As Montrealers struggled up and down the slippery winter steps, they also enjoyed spacious (and spatially efficient) interiors, with no indoor space lost to circulation. By the same token, indoor heating wasn’t wasted on hallways, saving energy in the winter months. And though the looping stairs can be difficult — even treacherous — to navigate in winter, a fresh-air evacuation route is hardly a hindrance in case of fire. (In what was long an overwhelmingly Catholic province, a popular folk theory also posited that the outdoor stairs encouraged civic piety by putting prospective romantic rendezvous in view of prying public eyes).
In the 21st century, the vernacular has not been forgotten. Although today’s restrictive North American building codes typically result in a different expression — namely double-loaded corridors that facilitate our two required egresses — Montreal designers have continued to learn from history. In 2018, for example, ADHOC Architectes framed a three-storey residential building in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve with simple outdoor stairs, making for generous living spaces inside. Two years later, Saia Barbarese Topouzanov Architectes (SBTA) unveiled a sensitive adaptation of the expansive Habitations Saint-Michel Nord social housing complex, elevating the buildings’ many brightly coloured spiral stairs into a placemaking motif. And just last year, Ædifica pushed the envelope further, leveraging outdoor circulation to provide eye-catching egress at the two-building Cité Angus II, and opening up the mid-rise floor plates to generously sun-filled and cross-ventilated units. Now how about a tower?
In downtown Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles cultural district, local designers MSDL Architects (formerly known as Menkès Shooner Dagenais LeTourneux) recently unveiled what might be the city’s most unconventional contemporary high-rise complex. Led by maverick local developers Rachel Julien, the two-volume Laurent & Clark tower block translates into a much denser, taller context. Built out in two phases, the 356-unit development links a pair of residential towers with an exterior passage and exit stair across the north tower’s east frontage.
Atop a shared three-storey podium, the two slim towers sit perpendicular to one another. On the south, a sleek black volume spans the site’s narrow frontage along Boulevard de Maisonneuve, while the lighter north building meets Clark Street with pops of yellow and orange along its west-facing balconies. Meanwhile, the east face is given over to exterior circulation, with the 21-storey, 65-metre tower’s northeast corner prominently accented by a looping concrete stair. From the exterior, it reads as a playful and somewhat exuberant homage to the city’s residential vernacular. Inside, it transforms the project’s spatial logic.
In the north tower, the exterior passageway eliminates the need for a central indoor hallway, with interior circulation instead organized around four discrete elevators. Each of the elevator bays is arranged as a “point access block,” where residential units are accessed directly from the landing. The space-saving arrangement allows more of the interior floor area to be given over to living space, accommodating “passthrough” units which face both east and west.
The cross-ventilated suites welcome sunlight throughout the day, but the orientation also serves a site-specific context, with residential balconies overlooking the many public events and festivals that take place immediately to the west, while also retaining a much quieter mid-block east frontage. (By eliminating an indoor hallway in the north building, the architects were also able to carve out an exceptionally slender floor plate only 14 metres in width.)
For residents in both towers, the outdoor circulation scheme provides access to two exit stairwells. From the north building, residents can opt for the exterior steps, or cross a skybridge into the south tower, where they meet an indoor stair and elevator bay. Likewise, the south volume’s residents are served by both an indoor stair and the outdoor passageway, accommodating a more spatially efficient residential volume. It all adds up to an elegantly slender pair of forms — capped by a distinctly Montreal accent. As the MSDL team puts it, “it creates a new silhouette that stands out from the background, revealing itself as a new presence in this part of the metropolis.”
At Quartier des Spectacles, MSDL and Rachel Julien’s Laurent & Clark is a bold reinvention of the high-rise residential form. And like so many of its contemporaries, its innovation is rooted in heritage — adapting the exterior stair for a new century. Although it can be tempting to read such design moves as a sentimental nod to the past, they are fundamentally rooted in the same concerns as their 19th century forebears. The basic tenets of saving space — and budget — while maximizing residential floor area is as true today as it was in the 19th century. For all its romance, the stairs are less a winking homage to vernacular than an extension of its spatial and economic logic.
The post Why Exterior Stairs (Still) Shape Montreal’s Urban Fabric appeared first on Azure Magazine.