Place Ville-Marie or 1, Place Ville-Marie is a cruciform office tower built in the International style in 1962 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is 188m (617ft) in height with 45 stories. Along with an underground shopping mall, it forms the nexus of Montreal's underground city, one of the world's largest, with indoor access to over 1,600 shops, restaurants, offices, and businesses, as well as many of Montreal's metro stations, transportation termini, and tunnels extending all over downtown.
The name "Place Ville-Marie" is often used to refer to the cruciform building only but it also applies to three shorter office buildings which were built around it in 1963 and 1964, and to the urban plaza which lies on top of the largest section of the shopping promenade, and between the buildings. From a postal point of view the cruciform tower is "1, Place Ville-Marie" and the lesser buildings around it are "2, Place Ville-Marie" and so on. The buildings and the plaza have been given many facelifts over the years. In the latest much of the grey concrete and terrazzo of the plaza was covered with grass, flowers and shrubs. The complex has 2.7 million square feet (250,000 m²) of space and parking for about 900 cars. There are about 70 tenants with 3,000 employees.
The location of Place Ville-Marie was originally a deep hole gouged in the flanks of Mount Royal by the need to give a Northern extension to the tracks of Montreal's central station of the Canadian National Railway. Most of the building was thus built over the tracks, requiring the structure to be more resistant to vibrations than normally required. As a result, it is the most earthquake-resistant office tower in Montreal.
Place Ville-Marie was one of the first designs of Henry N. Cobb and I. M. Pei, who was later to become a famous master of Modernist Architecture. His design was controversial from the start given its proximity to many Montreal landmarks and the vast changes it would bring to the downtown core.
Conceived and built at a time when Montreal was the economic hub of Canada, the structure's largest occupant and anchor tenant was the Head Office of the Royal Bank of Canada, the country's largest bank. However, the Quebec sovereignty movement, the terrorism resulting in the October Crisis and the 1976 election of the separatist Parti Québécois as the Province's government brought a great deal of political uncertainty to the Montreal business world. When the Parti Québécois legislated the Charter of the French Language it made it impossible for the Royal Bank to maintain Head Office functions in Quebec. As a result, the bank began phasing out its many Head Office departments and transferred them to Toronto, Ontario. Over the ensuing years the bank built the Royal Bank Plaza in Toronto and eventually changed its official head office address to that city to reflect the reality. Today, all that remains of the bank in Place Ville-Marie is a small regional Business Banking Centre.
In addition to being the only cruciform building in the core of the city, Place Ville-Marie stands out even more at night because of the rotating beacon on its roof. Its four spotlights are visible at more than 50 kilometres. The building's penthouse contains the Altitude 737 restaurant and nightclub (named for its elevation in feet from sea level) and opens onto a rooftop terrasse.
The complex is currently owned by the SITQ , a division of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDP Capital), who bought the building in March 2000 for CDN$450 million.
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