Construction Canada Magazine

By Odile Hénault
How do you squeeze a mega-hospital—three already large institutions merged into one—into the heart of a city such as Montréal? To make matters more complicated, it is on a tight site, literally at the door of one of the continent’s most exquisite low-scale historical quarters. How do you take Québec’s largest university hospital, providing ultra-specialized care in up to 35 medical disciplines, and fit it within walking distance from a major festival area, which causes entire city blocks to be closed off to vehicular traffic during a good part of the summer? Additionally, an eight-lane half sunken expressway and a major subway line have to be taken into account as they run right underneath Phase I of this whole project. Is there any room left for an architectural statement within this context?

The Centre de recherche du Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CRCHUM), or Montréal University Hospital Centre’s Research Centre, was no easy challenge for the architects, particularly since they also had to work within the constraints of a public-private partnership (P3) with several levels of government and a major university involved in the process. Phase 1, the Research Centre itself, opened its doors in September 2013. The second phase, the actual hospital complex, is slated to be finished by 2016, while the third and final phase, involving the demolition of an existing hospital on the northernmost part of the site, will be done last.

Brief historical background
For a project such as this, it is important to know some of the backstory. The concept of the overall CHUM—beyond the Research Centre that is the focus for this article—was created in 1995 to rationalize the operations of three institutions:

• Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, the city’s oldest hospital;
• Hôpital Notre-Dame; and
• Hôpital St-Luc.

From the outset, it was intended the CHUM become a single-site institution. The difficulties entailed in planning such a mega-project, however, meant innumerable delays, due in part to the periodical changing of the guard at the provincial level.