La Charbonnière designed by Alain Carle Architecte, Located on the mountainside in the heart of a large real estate development project, the site of this residence essentially had been stripped by the developer to promote views of the St. Lawrence River and thus stimulate sales of the project lots. Paradoxically, this destructured the natural landscape, rendering appropriation of the site for residential purposes more complex, given the overexposure of the land. The resulting monumentality of the landscape is as spectacular as it is difficult to appropriate on a residential scale.
Photography: James Brittain Photography
That is why the project attempts to fit into this landscape while seeking a relationship it can offer in a context of domesticity. Curiously, this situation is not unrelated to the long tradition of settlement in the Charlevoix region (Québec), characterized by the modest scale of the dwellings set against the immensity of the St. Lawrence River and the rolling landscape. ?La Charbonnière? was designed around this problem of ?fitting? into the landscape, a consideration that is both formal and cultural.
We believe the mode of implementation of the region?s traditional rural complexes has translated the rustic culture of yesteryear, which has almost disappeared today. The subtlety with which the villagers appropriated their territory according to a precise arrangement of small volumes of homes or outbuildings, has today been supplanted by a uniform deploy...