An Exhibition Curated from 6 Elementary School Design Competitions in Quebec

 

K-12 public schools have persisted in mirroring an outdated form of teaching that no longer serves students. Thus, the physical schooling spaces themselves are also outdated and long-overdue for reinvention.

The professional world has communicated that the search for skilled talent is difficult; students are graduating from K-12 environments without the skills and qualities companies are looking for, and our teaching methods are slowly adapting in response – less lecturing/call-and-response, and more opportunities for open-ended critical thinking, leadership from students, and freedom to find multiple creative solutions when presented with lesson challenges.

In Quebec, Lab-École has unveiled the architectural designs for elementary schools to be expanded or built in Gatineau, Maskinongé, Québec City, Saguenay, Shefford, and Rimouski. Five designs stem from the “Imagining the Schools of Tomorrow, Together” architectural design competition launched by Lab-École. In addition, a sixth school sketch for the Québec City school was produced by the Lab-École team.

For those unfamiliar, Lab-École is an interesting non-profit organization founded in 2017 whose mission is to “bring together multidisciplinary expertise to design the schools of tomorrow. Under the leadership of its three founding members, Pierre Thibault, Pierre Lavoie, and Ricardo Larrivée, the Lab-École aims to transform this collective reflection into a social project. To achieve this goal, the organization combines the knowledge of teaching staff with that of specialists from other horizons to create the best schools in Quebec, schools that fully promote the well-being of students, and those who work and live with them.”

“The Lab-École is a catalyst for innovative initiatives in the physical environment, healthy and active lifestyles, and food at school. In keeping with the “laboratory” spirit, its operation is open and flexible, focused on exploration and experimentation. The Lab-École carries out its projects in close collaboration with each school team and its community. The Lab-École supported the implementation of the first architectural competition in 50 years dedicated to school design.”

The competition was the first school building design contest in nearly 50 years, and the jury received more than 160 proposals for the five school projects. The five competition winners are:

>Étienne Bernier Architecture (EBA) + APPAREIL Architecture + BGLA (Saguenay Lab-École school);

>DMA Architectes (Gatineau Lab-École school);

>Pelletier de Fontenay + Leclerc Architectes (Shefford Lab-École school)

>L’ŒUF + Lapointe Magne & Associés (Rimouski Lab-École school);

>Paquet-Taillefer + Leclerc Architectes (Maskinongé Lab-École school).

“We felt that holding an architectural design competition was a logical way to keep up our innovative momentum,” said Pierre Thibault, architect and Lab-École co-founder,” in a press announcement. “Competitions generate a wide variety of designs. They also help demonstrate Quebeckers’ immense creativity, which will be put in service of the educational sector. It was important for Lab-École to step off the beaten path and invite novelty. The impressive number of proposals we received also shows that Quebec architects want to contribute to these new living environments.”

Added Pierre Lavoie, Lab-École co-founder, “These schools will be a huge step forward. They are a far cry from the traditional two-storey boxes that currently exist. These are pavilion-style learning environments, with sloped roofs, more organic shapes, and other details. It’s a completely different approach. When the school stakeholders saw the designs, they were amazed that a school could look like that! They were deeply touched by the proposals submitted, imagining all the good they could bring the entire community.”

In an officeinsight interview, we spoke with Jérôme Lapierre, architect and jury member from Lab-École, about how each of the new schools will be “true living environments that are caring, open to nature, and open to their communities.

“The projects are very different from each other, because they are all in unique regions of Quebec,” noted Lapierre. “Lab-École wrote an architectural program for each school, and they are similar in nature, but we really wanted to encourage a wide range of ideas, that spoke directly to each individual site. What is so exciting to us about these competitions is that they were testing so many different typologies of learning.”

“A school is often the first public building that children usually encounter and spend time in, so it’s very important to show them that the built environment is for them – that they have a sense of belonging and community,” continued Lapierre. We also want to draw attention to human health. Lab-École is about building new schools, but we’re focusing on how we can encourage movement in the learning space, how we can invite healthy eating and agriculture in a school setting – in children, but also in the teaching staff and other adults.”

All of the school sites are public institutions that are open and free to all neighborhood children, with most being located in lower-income areas. The projects include entirely new schools, as well as additions to existing schools.

“They will offer more space and more flexibility, which will help the students learn better, be more active, and eat better. They will also offer bright gathering spaces and inviting dining halls. Wider hallways will form “learning alleyways” that facilitate teaching practices adapted to the needs of today’s students. The architects carefully designed these models in keeping with the school stakeholders’ expectations, giving each square meter of invested space meaning and ensuring optimal use of all the spaces from morning to evening. The designs are based on general guidelines and vital elements (ref. Imagining the Schools of Tomorrow, 2019) stemming from two years of intensive research-creation, consultations and the mobilization of hundreds of key players (teachers, architects, researchers, citizens, parents, daycare service representatives, municipal elected officials, organizations and more). Lab-École carried out this work to pave the way for a new generation of schools designed to meet the current and future needs of the students and the school staff accompanying them.”

According to the press announcement, the five school service centers, the Western Quebec School Board, the winning architectural firms, and Lab-École have been hard at work concretizing the projects over the last few months. Construction is projected to begin summer of 2021, and the first Lab-École schools should be opening their doors for the fall 2022 semester.

All of the designs can be viewed on Lab-École’s website: www.lab-ecole.com, where you can find video clips presenting the six Lab-École schools, a catalog of Lab-École’s architectural design competition, data sheets on the projects and more.

An Exhibition Detailing The New School Designs

The new school designs are also available for public viewing at a special exhibition at the UQAM Design Centre in Montreal. Comprising the winning designs of six architectural competitions on the design of primary schools, including the five competitions run by Lab-École, and a sixth design competition involving master’s students in architecture and run by LEAP researchers (Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle).

The exhibition was curated by Jean-Pierre Chupin, professor at the University of Montreal, and we spoke to Mr. Chupin about the show’s role in creating awareness and discussion around the new projects.

“In competition and the comparisons it draws, we can think about how we can product quality design for our schools. How do we make the search for quality a more open, welcoming debate, not just the work of architects?”

Chupin stated in the exhibition’s introduction that the issue [of the design of school buildings] has “stagnated with a focus on management or on technological responses favoring the industrialization of school construction. Successive governments have obviously not done their architectural homework. The closure of schools imposed by the pandemic in 2020 has demonstrated the importance of the human dimension of pedagogy, a dimension that technology screens fail to convey. It also has revealed by default – to children, educators, and parents alike – that the school is a collection of precious and irreplaceable physical places.”

“Contrary to the tendencies to normalize and standardize educational spaces, a comparison of the different competitions reveals that the architecture of primary schools should not be limited to models that are repeatable whatever the urban context. By inviting multiple comparisons between sites, between the expectations of the different actors, as well as an exploration of the variety of architectural proposals, the exhibition allows the school to be considered as a place to learn about that complex relationship to coexistence known as urban living.”

The exhibition is structured around four major themes, addressing a school’s relationship to urban living – “because a school is also a small town in which meeting places, classrooms, collaborative spaces, and places for cooking and eating play a huge role in the various stages of learning.”

The exhibition at the Centre de design de l’UQAM in Montreal will run September 24 to November 22, 2020. Admission is free, and reservations must be made In advance to attend.