Observatoire de la Capitale
Glass-enclosed observation deck on the thirty-first floor of a Brutalist government tower, with three-hundred-sixty-degree river valley views.
This guide to the Observatoire de la Capitale in Quebec City starts with ironworkers bolting an unusual beam onto a bare concrete skeleton in the winter of 1967, a design that let the tower stand without the usual hidden cross of diagonal steel. It follows the Vierendeel beam back to the Belgian engineer who patented it for bridges, and how the city's architects, Fiset, Deschamps and Bartha, stood his invention on end to shape the tower's alternating bands of windows. You'll hear how the building topped out in 1972 as the tallest in the city. Stand where those ironworkers once worked and look out over the Saint Lawrence toward Île d'Orléans, the Appalachians and the Laurentians.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.