French River Visitor Centre / Baird Sampson Neuert Architects

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Text description provided by the architects. The French River marks the transition to the Canadian Shield, a landscape of granite scrapped bare by the passage of glaciers. In its descent from its headwaters, the River transforms from a fractured granite gorge, into a vast delta of sculpted granite islands and outcrops. Designated as Canada’s first Heritage Waterway, the River served as a trade route between First Peoples, and for Europeans, was the primary route for inland exploration of the continent and as the “Voyageurs’ Highway”. It has been a primary source of uniquely Canadian mythology, inspiring native pictographs and European depictions of heroic river journeys, and contemporary work from the Group of Seven.