Furniture made from lobster traps and informed by metal music feature in the independent furniture design studios in Montreal, Canada, presented as part of our North American Design 2024 series.
Just north of the border with the United States, Montreal is the largest city in the Canadian province of Quebec and the second largest Francophone city in the world, after Paris.
Once a major hub of the fur trade in North America, Montreal had a thriving industrial economy in the 20th century. It is well known from a design perspective for its 1967 International and Universal Exposition (Expo 67), where local architect Moshe Safdie presented the futuristic Habitat 67 apartment complex.

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The city has been dealing with a process of de-industrialisation for decades and relatively cheap rent, skilled labour and large post-industrial spaces have enabled a thriving arts scene.
Like Detroit, it received a UNESCO City of Design designation. The citation for the designation states that the city has a design industry that accounts for 34 per cent of the total economic input of its "cultural sector" and that as many as 25,000 professional designers are working in the city.
It has also become a hub of the study and research of artificial intelligence, with Google and Microsoft both opening research centres in the city.
Innovative uses of industrial materials
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