PROJECT Elää, Montreal, Quebec
ARCHITECT Kanva
TEXT Susan Nerberg
PHOTOS Alex St. Jean
Arriving at the street corner that marks the entrance to the Montreal borough of Verdun, you can?t miss the black-and-white set of blocks anchoring the intersection. With its dark streetside façade jutting out at different vertical planes, it stands in stark contrast to the surrounding brick duplexes and triplexes that define the area. And that?s exactly the point. Designed by the young architecture firm Kanva, Elää isn?t just the new kid on the block. It?s an entirely new kind of place for living.
A Scandinavian-inspired aesthetic distinguishes the multi-unit Elää from neighbouring triplexes in the Montreal borough of Verdun.
?We wanted to create a new typology?a village,? says architect Dina Safonova of Kanva. She explains that the borough has many pockets of green space and swaths of nature. The citizens favour some degree of communal living, making ample use of the area?s parks, trails and marina. ?Verdun sits between the St. Lawrence River and the historic Lachine Canal, so people are always close to nature and water, and they like to get outside,? Safonova says. The design for Elää takes these broader community elements and makes them central to its overarching theme. Rendered site plan.
Composed of six separate building blocks, which all together house 41 condos, the complex is conceived as a village. At the centre of this village is a green space that, much like a town s...