The building?s canted volumes maximize daylight, while opening views to St. Patrick?s Basilica on the adjoining parcel.
PROJECT HEC Montréal Hélène-Desmarais Building, Montreal, Quebec
ARCHITECT Provencher_Roy
TEXT Olivier Vallerand
PHOTOS Ema Peter
Montreal-based Provencher_Roy has long demonstrated its aptitude for creating dynamic education facilities and university buildings, dating back to one of their breakthrough projects, UQAM?s J.-A.-De Sève building (1998). The lessons learned from this wealth of work are brightly visible in the Hélène-Desmarais Building, the new centre for Montreal?s post-secondary business school, HEC, in the heart of the city?s commercial core. 
Led by then-partner Alain Compéra, Anne Rouaud, and Gerardo Pérez, the architect team transformed an odd-shaped downtown site into a building that feels at once intimate and on-brand with HEC?s executive-oriented profile. The design takes inspiration from HEC?s role as an early-twentieth-century institution of the primarily French-speaking side of downtown: in 2000, its original building on Square Viger was transformed in the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec?s Archives Centre, by Dan Hanganu and Provencher_Roy. Since that time, the institution has operated from two buildings at the Université de Montréal campus, on the other side of the mountain?a Brutalist one designed by Roland Dumais and recently renovated by Provencher_Roy, the other a new-build by Dan Hanganu and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte ...