Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
March 6, 2024
peterblack@qctonline.com
The newly renovated Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy has a performance theatre, a movie theatre, a kitchen area, a terrasse with a garden, several play areas for children, a recording studio, a broadcast room, bold works of art, musical instrument rentals, a seedling plant zone, a number of meeting rooms and more.
It also has books and documents, as a library should – more than 200,000 of them.
With a strike by city library employees delaying the official reopening of the facility (see article on p. ??), officials gave reporters a tour Feb. 28 to unveil the results of years of construction and planning dating back to 2016.
Visitors to the library, when it does open to the public after its $43.3 million makeover, will see a vastly brighter, more open and varied space compared to the gloomy interior of the original building that opened in 1983. While the familiar staircase and circular storeys remain, they have been completely rebuilt.
Designed around the concept of 10 “thematic centres,” the building itself is more than a quarter larger than the original structure, at 10,500 square metres. The design team was a consortium led by Saucier + Perrotte and GLCRM.
Mayor Bruno Marchand said in a statement, “This central library is an exceptional place – one of the most beautiful in Canada, and I would even go so far as to say in the world.”
While the transformation of the library’s interior space and exterior structure is an impressive enough achievement, the city architect overseeing the project has said the most difficult challenge was having to essentially redo from top to bottom an existing structure in a busy urban zone.
Yasmina Lacasse said transforming a building erected in the 1980s to conform to current regulations meant “lots of changes to the structure” in terms of, for example, earthquake resilience standards and electromechanical infrastructure.
On top of the architectural and engineering challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic and its ripple effects presented a major setback and caused construction delays. In spring 2023, “major repairs to a beam” delayed completion further. The opening date was initially targeted for last spring.
Although there is some question about the global cost of the project, officials say it stayed within the $43.3 million budget with the help of some cost-cutting measures such as reducing the size of the rooftop terrasse.
The provincial government contributed about $10 million and the federal government $1.5 million to the project.
Lacasse said, “I’m just hoping every citizen finds themself in it, likes every space or just only one, and maybe discovers something else, something new, something that could be interesting. So I really hope citizens like it as much as we thought they would.”
The library features some 11 major art pieces by Quebec artists, including the refurbished work by Micheline Beauchemin that hangs in the atrium, comprising some 18,400 strips of golden aluminum.
There is also a portrait of the library’s namesake painted by Jean-Paul Lemieux in 1953 and on loan from the Institut Canadien.
The library’s extensive archival collection will be more accessible in the new building. As an example, on display for the media tour was a city register with the signatures of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth dated May 17, 1939, signed when the royal couple toured Canada and the United States to drum up support for the impending war with Nazi Germany.
Whenever the library finally opens to the public, Marchand said, “It is up to the population to reclaim this incredible place of culture and knowledge which will become an important part of our cultural signature in Quebec.”
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The familiar hanging artwork has been restored and returned to the newly revamped main staircase in the library.
Photo by Peter Black
City architect Yasmina Lacasse, who oversaw the project, checks out the secret door in the children’s book section.
Photo by Peter Black