The Versant classes
A shelter, a burrow, a cocoon, an enveloping warmth where one feels good. A nest that welcomes and trains until it is time to take flight. A school whose residential architectural language shines through. This environment becomes the fertile ground from which the child will draw his or her sources, modulating his or her distinct abilities, sensibilities and capacities. A house to build, to be authentic, to be well, to take care of oneself and others.
Architectural party
The new Marguerite D'Youville school is intended to reflect a typical Saguenayan living environment, a village intertwined with strong ties to its natural environment, anchored in the culture of its inhabitants. The building is distinctly divided into small houses, which are organized around an exterior courtyard, united by glass circulations. The architectural approach is to deconstruct the conventional school, this institutional-looking building, to transform it into a friendly, accessible and warm scale for the child; to construct buildings on the scale of toddlers; to fragment a complex program into a readable volumetry; to offer various landmarks. The school's characteristic pedagogical approach, described as "nurture", colored the project, creating a reassuring and familiar architecture.
Location
The project sits comfortably on Boily Street to provide a street frontage of a scale that is in keeping with the adjacent residential fabric, while being inviting to the passerby. This gesture goes hand in hand with the desire to redevelop this artery into a one-way street to offer a safer environment for children, which promotes active transportation by sharing the roadway.
The "U" shaped articulation allows for the development of a safe interior courtyard conducive to recreational as well as educational activities. The morphology of the building is sculpted with respect to climatic flows, allowing the space to face south and to be protected from prevailing winds throughout the year, thus creating a pleasant microclimate that varies with the day and the season.
In response to the uneven topography, the building is designed on two main levels: the first floor is accessed from the street and the garden level from the courtyard. The areas initially planned for the first floor in the first phase were relocated to allow for wood-frame construction (C.N.B.) and thus accentuate the residential character. The gymnasium is positioned in the lower part of the site at the level of the existing sports fields.
Program
The Marguerite D'Youville school is a microcosm, a small village, each segment functioning as an autonomous neighborhood from the others and united at its center by pleasant and dynamic public spaces.
The project is articulated in three main built sections; one gathering the spaces open to the community, while the other two regroup the different learning communities and the spaces intended for the personnel.
Several entrances are provided and are expressed in a way that is understandable to the different users. Students enter directly into their learning community via different accesses to the courtyard, including an exterior staircase located at the main entrance. Adjacent to this staircase, a second, interior entrance is provided to access the administrative space. To the east of the grounds, an independent community entrance is provided for direct access to the sports facilities independently of the school's schedule. To the west, an access is provided for the staff, near the parking lot.
The street wing includes the staff quarters on the first floor, which enliven the façade, while below, on the garden level, the preschool classrooms are located. The strategic location of the kindergartens on the lower level allows for a strong relationship with the courtyard, contributing to safety.
The central wing is the most permeable. It offers large spaces representing the urban core, dynamic and effervescent, encouraging the socialization of students. The gymnasium is located at the intersection of two wings and is directly connected to the sports fields, facilitating the use of the facilities by the community. The bleacher, the heart of the school, provides physical and visual connections to all the communal spaces.
The third wing is subdivided into three houses, each housing a primary cycle. Each learning community is thus organized on two levels, promoting a domestic scale.
Luminous interstices connect the cycles and reinforce the identity of each learning community. These translucent and inviting junctions provide visual breakthroughs to the heart of the project, the outdoor courtyard, which promotes orientation within the school. The common spaces and circulation overlook the courtyard, forming transitional zones between the bustle and noise of recess and the quiet concentration necessary for classroom learning. Thus, all classrooms benefit from the northern light.
Innovation
The architectural project celebrates the sensitive relationship to the territory by drawing inspiration from vernacular architecture, using regional, raw or recycled materials and promoting the circular economy.
While the built body of the smaller houses is made of light wood framing and decking, the collective spaces denoting larger spans expose a glulam beam system. Wood from local sawmills will be used in both the interior and exterior cladding. This aesthetically sensitive material will provide warmth and acoustic comfort for the children.
As Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean is the cradle of the aluminum industry, the project aims to use this resource for several applications: in roofing, but also in the pouring of concrete foundations and floor slabs. The valorization of residual materials from aluminum for the manufacture of cement paste will make it possible to obtain a more ecological concrete. The reuse of hardwood studs, used in the delivery of raw materials, to manufacture furniture is also proposed.
Passive and active systems
The project is a laboratory exploring the simplification of building mechanics and the increase of comfort. Heating and cooling will be done mostly with hydronic radiant floors, the most comfortable technology for the occupant. The new air will be distributed according to the principle of displacement ventilation allowing the integration of all the diffusers to the architectural elements. The excellent performance of the building envelope coupled with passive bioclimatic strategies allow for heating and cooling systems with reduced capacity, lower operating costs and full integration with the architecture. The passive design features reinforce the biophilic approach of the school: valuing solar radiation, allowing windows to be opened in each room, etc. These principles reinforce the idea that the occupant can inhabit and participate in bringing the school to life.
Landscaping
Located in the heart of an urban grid fragmented by large patches of vegetation, the project proposes a design that enhances the existing landscape by branching out harmoniously; playgrounds, like mini ecosystems, to understand the water cycle, the pleasures of market gardening and the richness of biodiversity. The plant palette is indigenous and local, inspired by the beauty of the Saguenay and its northern character.
If we were asked the most precious benefit of the house, we would say: the house shelters the dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows us to dream in peace. (Bachelard, 1957) At the dawn of his life, the child will be able to grow up in this school, to create memories in this house and to build his future, because everything is possible to the one who knows how to dream.
(Competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
Stage 1:
The project's siting and templates are sensitive to their surroundings, with angular volumes that echo the urban fabric of the neighborhood. For the jury, the evocation of houses on a human scale, with its pavilions by cycle and its materiality of wood, contributes to the impression that this school could be very welcoming for the students and the community.
The jury appreciates the interior courtyard and already visualizes the entrance of the students in the morning by the stairs allowing access to the classes grouped by learning community.
The entrance, checkroom, access to the learning core and classrooms seem to work well and there seems to be a good connection between the two floors. The jury appreciates the plan organization of the project, particularly the grouping of the classrooms/cycles, which is well structured and linked to the collaborative and concentrated spaces.
The jury notes several qualities in the project's layout: the reception and core are well located, treated as open spaces, with access to the bleacher and secretariat. The access between the preschool classrooms and the outdoor courtyard should be maintained. The sequence of locker rooms with the entrances seems to work well.
In the same spirit, the pathway and its threshold with the gathering place appear to be flexible enough so that all can communicate with the backyard.
The inner courtyard is a very positive point. It will open up the opportunity to teach outside, and the ladder will likely provide a sense of security even for the smallest children.
Recommendations:
Siting and architectural expression:
+ Nice volumetric interest, but the complexity of pitched roofs carries risks. Competitors should consider simplifying the whole and unifying the connections between the roofs to allow for maintenance (eaves, roof junctions, ...).
+ Review the architecture of the roofs and the interstice of the buildings to solve the problems of water infiltration and snow piling.
+ The compressed size of the courtyard and the status of the slope (siting interaction) would need to be re-examined.
+ The bus landing needs to be reconfigured as buses should not back up into other traffic lanes
+ For budgetary reasons the jury believes that underground parking is unrealistic and should be reconsidered.
Layout:
+ Competitors are asked to rework the node of social-emotional development spaces, the children's center is less accessible. Stakeholder office needs to be closer to classrooms and the heart of the school.
+ The jury suggests that the access to the courtyard be opened up to prevent the project from being introverted.
+ The jury suggests adjusting the classroom for the arts, language and music workshop to be a closed classroom space.
+ The jury questioned the location (avoid the 3rd floor) and proportions (on 2 levels) of the psychomotricity room used by the preschool and 1st cycle and asked for a revision.
+ The jury invites the competitors to work on the proportions of the classrooms, which will be almost two and a half floors high.
Stage 2:
The great quality of the project lies in its adequacy to the vision of the school. The jury was seduced by the ability of the space to create a sense of calm for the school's students. The different spaces, varying in scale, are well exploited and provide the desired socio-affective character, as much in the house-like layout creating a secure courtyard as in the interior spaces and the treatment of the schoolyard. The irregularity of the plan of each learning community is evocative of the development by the child of a sense of belonging to his or her place of learning and of the discovery of the place as it develops. The autonomy of the different pavilions offers a conceptual freedom that will allow the project to be adapted throughout its development while preserving its fundamental qualities.
In addition, the jury appreciates the following elements:
+ The orientation of the interior spaces that open up to the courtyard, particularly the interstices between each of the houses and the tier in the heart of the school.
+ The highly functional spatial organization, including the management of the various accesses in keeping with the qualities of the site, the location of community functions facilitating sharing with the community and the interface created with the existing sports fields.
+ The constructive system, which has been deepened with bioclimatic studies, the ecological aspects and the recycling of materials, the discourse on the circular economy and the integration of the local economy, the integration of passive strategies.
+ The quality of the treatment of external spaces.
+ The organization of the socio-affective space integrating a mezzanine that creates appropriate and reassuring places for the children.
+ The implementation taking into account the solar orientation and the views it provides.
The jury has certain reservations about the following elements:
+ The inequity of the spatial quality between the first floor classrooms and those on the upper floor. The inequity of the spatial quality between the ground floor and upper floor classrooms, and the fact that the first floor classrooms do not have direct access to the collaborative space.
+ The durability of the building envelope construction system and the lack of finesse of the tectonic junctions.
+ The volume of the interior spaces at the top of the building raises concerns about the proportion of spaces, the management of acoustics and the volume of air to be treated.
Recommendations to the winner:
+ Validate with the school community the location of the calming spaces and the positioning of the outdoor classroom.
+ Explore the opening of the interior courtyard to the park to better serve the site facilities and facilitate the management and full use of the courtyard.
+ Revalidate the height and proportions of the classroom and core volumes.
+ Optimize the area that exceeds the needs of the architectural program.
+ Find added value to first floor classrooms that do not have direct access to the collaborative space (e.g. direct access to the exterior).
+ Qualify the architectural expression, which should better reflect the school typology, by aiming at the durability of the ensemble in terms of materiality, assembly control and architectural character.
+ Ensuring the performance of the building envelope system in terms of achieving outstanding energy efficiency.
+ Enhance the interface between the gymnasium depot and the exterior in order to match the project with educational needs with a sports flavour.
+ Pay particular attention to acoustic elements, especially in double-height spaces.
(From jury report)
(Unofficial automated translation)
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