The new Faculty of Music brings a breath of freshness to Montreal’s McGill University campus. This eight-stories building designed by Architects Saucier + Perrotte is located on a narrow strip of land at the South-East corner of McGill at the intersection of Sherbrooke and Aylmer streets. Design Principal Gilles Saucier did a careful reading of the urban context assimilating its components and deriving the conceptual guidelines for the building’s exterior.

South of the McGill Campus lies the Montreal downtown area. All the way to Sherbrooke, the land is relatively flat. Then it starts ascending upward to the mountain of Mont-Royal. Gilles Saucier was inspired from these topographical conditions; "It's as if McGill acted like a geological plate that shifted the city grid, so the building design accentuates that fact." The building was imagined as exposed strata that were eroded from Mont-Royal.

Based on their extensive Hollywood background, Bastien and Associates, Inc. created an educational center that closely emulates the working conditions of a professional film studio. The design goal of Marion Knott Studios unites professional entertainment industry standards with an academic environment tailored to both storytelling and techincal production.


From the column-free 34 ft. clear height soundstages to the state-of-the-art editing and mixing suites and the 500-seat screening theater, the components of the school of film and television reflect their industry counterparts.  The resulting professional quality elements facilitate students with a seamless transition between their academic experience and a career in the film and television industry.

A topography sculpted of folded, skewed metal planes, the Vail House seems to enter into a love affair with the hill, blurring the boundaries between the natural and the artificial.

The design of the Vail House was generated by the integration of two disparate forces: the mundane requirements of the regulations imposed by zoning codes, economic constraints and the technical challenge of building on a steep hillside, and on the other hand the careful attention to the very specific condition of the site itself and to its surroundings. This made the project a unique expression of the generic and the specific.

French Architect Paul Andreu imagined China’s National Grand-Theater as a cultural Island rising from its surrounding water.

The project is located at the heart of Peking along the Chang’An Avenue neighboring the people’s assembly at around 1500 ft. (500m) from the Forbidden City. The decision to build this project in a location that gathers numerous historic and symbolic buildings demonstrates the emphasis that the authorities allocate to culture and the performance Art and their importance to the image of Modern China.

A major concert hall space in Porto, Portugal designed by  Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas  and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. It is located on a plaza between a historic area of Porto, the Rotunda da Boavista and a newer working-class neighborhood.

As a result of Porto being selected as one of the two cultural capitals of Europe in 2001, the Minister of Culture and the city of Porto founded Porto 2001, an organization which was to initiate and prepare different urban and cultural interventions for the city of Porto. In this context five international architectural practices, amongst which was OMA, were invited to participate in a restricted competition for a new concert hall to be positioned in the historical centre of Porto, the Rotunda da Boavista.

Image courtesy of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)