Cartier Square Drill Hall

Winner of the City of Ottawa's Award of Excellence for Heritage Conservation, this project involved restoring the exterior of the 1879 building to its original condition and upgrading the interior structure to meet current seismic standards.

The renovations provided a large multi-purpose assembly room and associated support facilities including a shooting range with sophisticated lead removal and containment systems. 

The drill hall also includes an officer’s mess, bar, band-practice room and regimental offices. A regimental museum includes environmental controls for archival storage, custom-display cabinets for artifacts and customized lighting. Additional displays of the museum’s collection appear in special cabinets throughout the drill hall and officer’s mess.

The Cartier Square Armoury on Laurier Avenue in Ottawa was built in 1879 and was repaired and renovated numerous times in the intervening years. Unfortunately, they were not all consistent with each other, resulting in a solid masonry structure of varying size, colour, and brick consistency. When the masonry was sand-blasted in 1981, a soft, permeable exterior surface was exposed. This was then covered by an impermeable “sand-filled acrylic paint” that hastened the deterioration of the brick by trapping in moisture. The existing structure was not insulated.