The Montréal landmarks of Claude Cormier

“A great lover of the city, of culture, and of art, Claude truly blazed a new trail in landscape architecture with poetic, inspiring, and uplifting work that challenged the modernist orthodoxy of public space, all the while remaining practical and appreciated in a popular context,” his firm CCxA stated. “He invited people to laugh, to come together, to see things differently.”

Over the years, Cormier was invited worldwide to present dozens of lectures featuring his firm’s work and design approach, and his projects won more than 100 awards.

Cormier was the visionary behind many of Montréal’s and the world’s best-loved public spaces and installations. Here are a few Montréal highlights:

The Ring

The Ring is a monumental 30-metre-diameter steel hoop, suspended between the modernist towers of Henry Cobb’s 1950s Place Ville Marie. As a piece of visual poetry, the installation marries Montréal’s beloved mountain, Mount Royal, and the revitalized public space of the downtown office complex. The Ring has become one of the most visited and photographed sites in the city.

Pink Balls

The Pink Balls installation (2011 – 2016) featured 170,000 pink balls suspended high in the air above the kilometre-long Sainte-Catherine Street East pedestrian mall in the LGBTQ+ Village, between St-Hubert and Papineau Streets. The plastic balls, in three different sizes and five subtle shades of pink, were strung together with bracing wire, crisscrossing the street and stretching through tree branches at varying heights.

18 Shades of Gay

The 18 Shades of Gay rainbow balls (2017 – 2019) replaced the Pink Balls in The Village. A succession of six principal colours, each in three distinct hues, combined to form an experience of 18 shades across 180,000 recycled plastic balls. These “Rainbow Balls” were seen from as far away as the Jacques Cartier Bridge and from the air, and the installation became so popular that tourists visited the strip on double-decker buses just to take pictures.

Lipstick Forest

The Winter Garden at the Palais des congrès de Montréal features a Lipstick Forest of 52 concrete trees, painted lipstick-pink to celebrate the city’s flourishing cosmetics industry and manifest Montréal’s inexhaustible joie de vivre. The concrete trees are patterned after the hundred-year old maples that line Parc Avenue. 

Dorchester Square

Dorchester Square is divided into two halves: Square Dorchester Place du Canada located south of Boulevard René-Lévesque, and Square Dorchester Nord located on the north side.

Square Dorchester Place du Canada restores the original Victorian public square and pays homage to when Dorchester Square was Canada’s wealthiest neighbourhood at the end of the 19^th century. A subtle ground pattern of cross prints in staggered rows recalls the desacralized cemetery below where 50,000 people were buried.

Square Dorchester Nord incorporates a classic Victorian water fountain: from the park side, the elevation of the fountain is revealed as a timeless water feature typical of Montréal’s mid-19^th century ‘belle-époque’ period, while from the street side, the fountain is sliced to be visible as a two-dimensional silhouette cut-out. Similarly, the original diagonal Victorian pathways radiating from the centre of Square Dorchester Nord that were sliced by two car ramps to the underground parking garage were restored with two arched pedestrian bridges.

Clock Tower Beach

The introduction of the Clock Tower Beach to the Quai de l’Horloge contributed to the recreational and cultural redevelopment of Montréal’s Old Port, at the foot of the historic 45-metre Clock Tower which was built between 1919 and 1922 as a memorial to sailors who died in the First World War. Located alongside the Montréal Yacht Club marina, the urban beach with its blue parasols offers stunning views of the mighty St. Lawrence River and Jacques Cartier Bridge.

Discover more of the creative genius of Claude Cormier and his visionary designers here.