True to the sawtooth shape of the wooden terrace at Gorilla Park, there were many zigs and zags on the road to realizing Montreal’s latest green space. After Canadian Pacific Railway tore up the train tracks running through the city’s Mile-Ex neighbourhood (and beyond) in the 1990s, nature gradually reclaimed a diagonal strip of land sandwiched between the area’s industrial buildings. But in 2013, a new landowner abruptly cleared the wild, leafy oasis that had emerged — dubbed “Parc des Gorilles” by locals because of its overgrown, jungle-like feel. “What happened was a major trauma for the neighbourhood, says Peter Soland, founding partner of landscape architecture studio Civiliti. “They wanted their forest back.”

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1The Agora includes an outdoor sink as well as electrical outlets, allowing it to host everything from cookouts to concerts.

2Steel planter beds that will be maintained by the community revive the vegetable gardens that were established in Gorilla Park’s original iteration.

3Civiliti’s wild landscaping necessitates a new maintenance strategy. “Most city parks are so oriented around mowing,” architect Peter Soland notes. “But this one does still require pruning by someone knowledgeable to make sure that the micro-forests aren’t invaded. It’s a fragile equilibrium.”

Eventually, the Friends of Gorilla Park non-profit convinced the city of Montreal to expropriate the land and reinstate their impromptu community square. Civiliti worked alongside the group to lead a co-design process, collecting requests for a rebooted woodland that would maintain its predecessor’s wild spirit while evolving into something more functional. Even before a design was drafted, the site was already back to serving as a successful gathering space — and Soland took notes. “During COVID, it became one of these special places for people to get together outside, and someone organized dancing in the park,” he says. 

Inspired by that activity, a large wooden platform sheltered by a Corten steel pavilion (“the Agora”) now accommodates all manner of social meetups. Other new elements — like a “lost railway car” steel enclosure with stepped bleacher seating — honour the site’s industrial heritage. “There were some requests to have a kind of railway running through again, but we were looking for a second-degree analogy rather than a first-degree reference,” Soland explains. Beyond that, he says, “formalizing the park was a fun exercise in trying to get the right lines.” When viewed from above, the triangular Agora structure acts as a cap to the trapezoidal building behind it. Meanwhile, the jagged terrace — filled with planter beds for community gardening — mimics the roofline of a former munitions factory nearby.

And then, of course, there is the greenery. Working alongside a biologist and forest engineer, Civiliti followed the Miyawaki method of cultivation, which focuses on planting dense, diverse mini-forests that stimulate rapid growth. Water management was another key consideration. By slightly reworking the site’s topology, the design team ensured that runoff from the adjacent street will flow into the permeable rain garden basin along the park’s edge. Soland says frog and rabbit sightings have been two early signs of success. But the ultimate milestone was seeing the Friends of Gorilla Park rejoice as trees were brought in. “It had been a 10-year fight to get this done, so it was really emotional for them,” he says. “It was just a dead desert for so long, and then all of a sudden, thousands of plants came back.”