Griffintown Horse Palace | Montreal, Canada

Griffintown Horse Palace, now the site of a contemporary gallery space, looks to negotiate the original site by folding and creasing itself to let light into the tight back alleys, paddocks and barns in this historic area of Old Montreal. While the new gallery's facade frontage addresses the hard street edge held by existing brick residences, its envelope then falls away to a ribcage of reclaimed timber members to create an outdoor gathering and exhibition space adjacent the existing surrounding buildings.

The Horse Palace is one of Quebec’s last operational urban stables. Efforts are in place to preserve this unique pastoral space within the city. On this site, Brooklyn-based HTDSTUDIO produced the winning entry for an unusual pairing of urban gallery and stables, which deftly adapts to the particularities of the site. A hard-edged glass façade onto the street falls away into a soft, undulating series of reclaimed wooden ribs, folding and creasing to let light into the tight alley leading to the stables.

Celebrating the complexities inherent in housing animals alongside humans, the scheme “puts aside the white museum world and embraces a rougher, brown horse-riding universe,” says jurist Mélanie Mignault. This temporary gallery elegantly gathers in the public from the street, gradually leading them back into a rich and unexpected equestrian world.