Place Ville-Marie, with its characteristic cruciform shape and its vast underground shopping malls, crowns the complex begun in 1911, and was built between 1959 and 1962. The surrounding buildings were added in 1963-1964, and one was raised in 1980.

The architects of this remarkable modern work, backed by an American developer, were the New York firm of Ieoh Ming Pei and associates, who would gain international renown with their design for the Louvre pyramid, and the Montreal firm of Affleck, Dimakopoulos, Lebensold, Michaud and Sise, who would also be responsible for Place Bonaventure. The focus of the whole project was a public square looking out over the McGill University campus and Mount Royal—an idea first proposed in 1952—that could be enjoyed both by pedestrians and by many of the guests at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.

The shape of this 42-storey building, with its international style, had been used elsewhere but remained innovative nonetheless. This "modern-day cross," a shape chosen on functional and economic grounds, would rapidly become a symbol of Montreal. In the same way, the searchlight beams sweeping over the city every night like some futuristic vision are an essential part of the Montreal imagination. The layout of the ground floor was an elegant response to the functional requirements of the Royal Bank, which took the opportunity to shift its head office from the historic city centre to the new downtown. Finally, the underground shopping malls that linked Place Ville-Marie with the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and Central Station would truly launch the underground city.

Today, tracks still run beneath the shops in Place Ville-Marie and into the Mount Royal tunnel, dug back in 1911 to give transcontinental trains access to downtown.

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