Every year, the Québec carnival has an ice palace as the focus of festivities. The architects were asked to renew the idea, and responded with the notion of producing a transitory new public space which could offer visitors the possibility of exploring the world of ice. A route was organized from huge randomly scattered sheets of ice, that were intended to recall the age of the glaciers, to today, where towers of frozen water evoked a modern Central Business District. The path led through an evocation of a 15m high igloo, the traditional winter dwelling of the Inuit, and an ice village, a memorial of the European colonial days with taming of the wild to humanly imposed order.
All this could have been pretty kitsch, but everything was abstracted. Light, both artificial and natural, constantly modified the place and added to its mysteries. The path was ordered by translucent ice walls, but each thematic space was opened to the surrounding city, contrasting abstraction with reality, ice and stone, the fleetingly transitory texture with the more slowly changing fabric of the North American city.
Contact: Pierre Thibault
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