We welcome all kinds of groups for guided tours. These visits include an introduction to the CCA’s ideas and approaches, as well as walks through the exhibitions on view. University and college groups are particularly welcome to hold classes, seminars, and conversations around a selection of materials from our collection.

For groups of less than thirty people, tours should be reserved three weeks in advance, but larger groups please contact us even sooner. The fee is $5 per person and includes admission. If you prefer to visit by yourselves, audio introductions to exhibitions can be accessed online with personal devices or on iPods, available for free at the front desk.

We develop visits between your interests and our current obsessions, so please contact us to begin a conversation: public@cca.qc.ca or call +1 514 939 7002.

With each new project we create new programs and workshops for young public from ages five to eighteen, offering new links to school curricula. Our programs go beyond traditional definitions of architecture to include subjects like energy, politics, and health. Currently, we offer the following programs: ABCs of Architecture, a hands-on introduction to form and volume, for grades 1–2; To Live Differently, students design houses for a world without oil, for grades 3–6; Disco, tomorrow?, designing a mutant nightclub and its furnishing, for high school students.

Other programs are offered irregularly, but with great enthusiasm, including activities for families like 3-1-1 and a Half, where children propose new ways of living with construction in cities. Check our calendar for upcoming events.

Please contact us to begin a conversation: public@cca.qc.ca or +1 514 939-7002

The CCA building and garden are an urban reconstruction project conceived in the 1980s in the western end of downtown Montreal, around the historically classified mansion known as the Shaughnessy House (1874, designed by William T. Thomas) and bridging a road that leads to the city’s system of highways. Opened in 1989, the twelve-thousand-square-metre new building was designed by Peter Rose with Phyllis Lambert, consulting architect, and Erol Argun, associate architect, to house exhibition galleries, the Paul Desmarais Theatre, a bookstore, research facilities including a study room open to the public by appointment, state-of-the-art conservation and collection facilities, and curatorial offices. In parallel, the conservation and restoration of the Shaughnessy House made it one of the rare nineteenth-century Montreal houses open to the public. Through scale, siting, and the juxtaposition of traditional and modern local materials—mainly grey limestone, structural aluminum, and maple wood—the CCA building relates architecture’s past and present.

The building is surrounded to the north by Baile Park, and to the south by Boulevard René-Lévesque and the CCA sculpture garden, which restored the urban fabric of an area deeply scarred by mid-twentieth-century highway engineering. Lying at the edge of an escarpment, the garden was designed by Montreal artist-architect Melvin Charney as part of the Quebec government’s competition program for the integration of art and architecture, combining sculpture and public space on a site granted to the CCA by the City of Montreal in 1986. At once a garden in the city and a museum in the open air, it evokes the history of landscape design and comments on Montreal’s early industrial sector below the hill, initiating a dialogue between nature, architecture, and the urban fabric.

The CCA Bookstore is open during regular museum hours. Here you will find CCA publications alongside other titles on contemporary architectural practice, architectural history and theory, city planning, landscape and garden history, photography, historical preservation, museum studies, and design from around the world.

For specific inquiries and orders please email books@cca.qc.ca or call +1 514 939 7028.

If you are looking for a specific book, you may also want to use the search tool. For an overview of new arrivals, please click here. Please note that prices cited are in Canadian dollars and are subject to change in line with foreign exchange rates.