Distinctions: Reward of the Year Grands Prix Du Design
Photo credit: Magalie Lafleur
Concept and challenges: Village Scalabrini is a social project that serves multiple purposes. It first addresses the community's need to preserve a place of worship and then fulfills the city of Montreal's request to create affordable housing for everyone. The project involves transforming a heritage church into a community center and adding a new building with 51 housing units on the remaining parcel.
One of the primary objectives was to establish a strong and tangible connection between the new building and the church, fostering dialogue and interactions among the different tenants.
Given the project's community and social focus, it was essential to create a welcoming and warm atmosphere in the common spaces while working within a limited budget. This led to a gradual shift in design principles toward signage, which quickly became a cornerstone of the project's identity.
To solidify the place's identity, the goal of this signage is to:
- Elevate and evoke the church by incorporating architectural elements into its design.
- Unify and bridge the project's identity, with signage serving as a link between the church and the new building.
- Adorn the corridors, which were otherwise bare due to budget constraints.
The Scalabrini signage is applied to the walls like votive icons and draws inspiration from calendar icons known as Menaions or Ménologes. These icons are constructed from wooden frames, playing with the stacking and superimposition of geometric elements. Symbolically, the signage alludes to the discovery of a cross, while stylistically, it echoes the central stained glass window of the church.
The signage serves various functions, including apartment numbers, directional signs, and a large logo, which is also engraved into an oak plywood block in the lobby, mirroring the complete form of the church's main stained glass window.
Crafted entirely from white oak plywood, the signage is cut using CNC technology with three levels, creating depth and negative space, once again echoing the language of stained glass where glass is cut and reassembled.
The graphic design team hand-drew all the numbers, creating a custom typography. The stacking of shapes, just like the stacking of plates, contributes to a typographic play that extends into the material and the space it integrates with.
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