The team at Le Cathcart Restaurants et Biergarten is excited to announce the official opening of its food courts. The Ivanhoé Cambridge project was conceived by Sid Lee Architecture and A5 Hospitality, and executed by Sid Lee Architecture and Menkès Shooner Dagenais LeTourneux Architectes in consortium.

The revitalization of the Place Ville Marie Esplanade forms part of Projet Nouveau Centre, Ivanhoé Cambridge’s vision for downtown Montreal. The revitalization aims to position Place Ville Marie as a major urban gathering point, rivalling those of other great metropolises.

“Renovations performed in the 1980s had become quite dated, and the owners wanted to bring in a new approach,” explains Jean Pelland, Architect and Senior Partner at Sid Lee Architecture. “After studying it from an historical point of view, we actually rolled back some of the modernist elements of the plan in order to strike a functional balance between architecture and usability.”

In the biergarten spirit, Le Cathcart provides a new 35,000 square foot space that opens to the city, offering a year-round festive, luminous, and welcoming environment. A lively urban square at the heart of the city’s busiest routes and summer terraces, Le Cathcart Restaurants et Biergarten echoes the vitality of Montreal streets.

“Realizing a project in downtown Montreal for an iconic site like Place Ville Marie comes with immense responsibility: to create a living environment that thousands of people will visit daily,” explains Yves Dagenais, Architect and Senior Partner at Menkès Shooner Dagenais LeTourneux Architectes. “By establishing a direct connection with urban activity, the implemented architectural response makes it possible to meet that challenge.”

The project focused on connecting the traffic of the vibrant city streets and the Place Ville Marie Esplanade to the indoor courtyard of Le Cathcart, enticing the public to enter the latter’s inviting environment. After reimagining the Esplanade, entrances, and connecting corridors, the same urban planning strategy was applied to Le Cathcart’s interior design. The result is an approach from the exterior that lures visitors to the discovery of two sunken courtyards, an indoor garden, and an expansive open space beneath a glass pavilion. Supported by 18 glass beams, a 16-foot, high-quality glass slat ceiling provides remarkable transparency, offering a seamless connection to the surrounding cityscape, as well as an unobstructed view of Mount Royal to the north. One of the largest glass structures of its kind in North America, the glass pavilion also infuses abundant natural light into Le Cathcart, both by day and by night.

The Place Ville Marie Esplanade’s four existing skylights gave way to this floating structure that connects the city to its underground counterpart.It serves as a new and enticing gateway from the city streets to the gourmet fair and elegant boutiques of Galerie Place Ville Marie.