Journal Voir

Finalist, Montreal Design Institute, 2001
Interior Design Category

Special Mention
Ordre des architectes du Québec, 2000
Commercial Architecture Category

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Creating the offices of the weekly cultural tabloid Voir was an integrated project: all the paper’s departments are on a single floor in a downtown office building. There are three basic elements to the architectural design:

• In the centre, in keeping with the structural grid of the building, is a huge, enclosed box-like space containing the reception area and support services. This is the heart of the paper. The rectangular hall is seen as a newspaper page, and the outside of the box is like a huge bulletin board for posting cultural events, reminiscent of the plywood walls erected around construction sites.

• Traffic circulates around the central core, providing access to the meeting rooms: the singular, white, prow-like pointes blanches.

• The various editorial and production departments occupies the rest of the floor, off-axis to the building’s structural grid. The way that the two grids interact creates views of the city and a multitude of specific spaces, which personalizes each department, each pointes blanches and each work station.

Offices are open-plan and the urban panorama is available to all. The architectural elements are expressed in their unrefined state: this is the architecture of accidental encounter, dynamic and burst open, rough yet fluid, like the city from which the project and the paper itself emerged.