TY  - Type of reference 
TI  - Tectonic roots of an architecture of knowledge: An imaginary cartography of the Hubert-Reeves Scientific Library 
AU  - Nicolas Reeves 
AB  - Beyond its practical and functional aspects, all architecture fundamentally stems from a poetic structure that summons a web of sensory, historical, and symbolic relationships, anchoring it to a place, a history, a line of thought, or the memory of an event. The Hubert-Reeves Science Library, part of the Université de Montréal’s new MIL campus, is no exception. By offering a personal and geopoetic interpretation of the library, this article seeks to elucidate the trajectories connecting it to the ideas of the renowned astrophysicist — whose son is the author — as well as to his values, his relationship with the world, and the imaginary of the Quebec landscape. The MIL campus is thus approached as a form of geophysical architecture, employing an explicitly mineral vocabulary of geodes, topographies, fault lines, strata and crystals. It appears to emerge from the tectonic imaginaries that shape the territory, drawing a map where the local and the cosmological, the ephemeral and the immemorial, collide and converge. The library’s two gardens — small, tree-filled craters carved into an elevated ground plane — serve as transplanted fragments of Mount Royal, the magmatic landform that hosts the university’s historic campus. They form the project’s living, poetic heart. The library can thus be read as a geology of knowledge: a subterranean stratum where insights from the crystalline structures above settle and transform, much like fertile sediment preparing the ground for future harvests. It also makes palpable a resonance, a link forged between human thought, the landscape, outside, but one arising from the very heart of the flows of matter and memory to which he, like all of us, owes his existence. 
DO  - 10.21494/ISTE.OP.2026.1494 
JF  - Art and Science 
KW  - architecture, library, cosmology, geophysics, tectonics, architecture, bibliothèque, cosmologie, géophysique, tectonique,  
L1  - https://www.openscience.fr/IMG/pdf/iste_artsci26v10nspe_1.pdf 
LA  - en 
PB  - ISTE OpenScience 
DA  - 2026/10/9 
SN  - 2515-8767 
TT  - Racines tectoniques d’une architecture de savoir : Cartographie imaginaire de la bibliothèque scientifique Hubert-Reeves 
UR  - https://www.openscience.fr/Tectonic-roots-of-an-architecture-of-knowledge-An-imaginary-cartography-of-the 
IS  - Special issue 
VL  - 10 
ER  -