1.5 ConEd Learning Hours
1.5 AIA LU

A sustainable future depends on our ability to radically reuse existing sites and buildings to meet climate challenges, citizens’ needs, and changing ways of life. Cities today must act and implement policies to counter global warming. Among the different strategies cities can put in place, the adaptive reuse of brownfields and aging buildings are effective sustainable solutions with the added benefits of improving public health and re-establishing links between a city’s neighbourhoods.

This presentation will explore Provencher_Roy’s radical thinking about sustainability through two different projects: the transformation of a contaminated industrial site, the Angus Shops, into Canada’s most sustainable neighbourhood; and the adaptive reuse of the Tour de Montréal, a building designed as an icon of the 1976 Summer Olympics that stood vacant for 45 years but is now a vibrant office destination. Today, both projects attract visitors, new residents, and professionals—prime examples of Montréal's ingenuity, cultural legacy, and forward-thinking collective identity. We argue for obsolete sites and buildings to become living parts of a city, sustaining their environments, economies, and heritage.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn how radical reuse strategies can transform modernist white elephants into buildings that sustain the environment, economy, and heritage of their community.
2. Learn how surgical interventions and new technologies, like building information modelling (BIM), can make transformative change while minimizing a project’s environmental impact and energy cost.
3. Learn how urban revitalization projects can become laboratories for sustainable development and social innovation.
4. Explore how a mixed-use green neighbourhood can maximize its sustainability with green infrastructure, including an energy loop, a collection system that reuses rainwater, and a landscape that promotes biodiversity.

Speaker:

Nicholas Demers-Stoddart, OAQ, OAA, RAIC, RIBA, B. ENG. (partner architect, Provencher_Roy)

As a partner since 2017, Nicolas Demers-Stoddart mainly assumes the role of lead designer with Provencher_Roy. His prior experience at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in New York, where he contributed to the design of the Marina Abramovic Institute, solidified his aptitudes and conceptual instincts. These abilities have been prodigiously expressed, particularly in the context of competition proposals. Nicolas is regularly invited to speak publicly about architectural design challenges at conferences, workshops, and exhibitions. He advocates for a multidisciplinary and sustainable approach as the way of the future in the architectural and environmental design professions.