Ecole du Zenith Shefford Québec, Canada school building design, Canadian architecture photos

École du Zénith in Shefford, Québec

8 September 2024

Architecture: Pelletier de Fontenay + Leclerc

Location: Shefford, Québec, Canada

Photos by James Brittain

Ecole du Zenith, Shefford, Canada

Pelletier de Fontenay, an architectural firm based in Montreal, in partnership with Leclerc Architects, presents École du Zénith, a project resulting from a series of competitions launched by Lab-École in 2019. Being the first school architecture competition since the 1960s, this major project marks a turning point in Quebec’s educational landscape, renewing the program, organization, and way of building primary schools in the province.

Set in a vast and open landscape, the school appears as a new horizon line, shaped by the interplay of volumes and roofs. The pavilions are assembled around an inner courtyard that frames magnificent views of Mount Shefford. The ensemble offers a dual interpretation, allowing the expression of both the individuality of each cycle and the broader school community. Each student can identify with their own pavilion, their own “home”, and thus visualize their past and future academic journey through the school cycles. With large windows, overhanging roofs, and multiple entry points, the architecture aims to make the boundary between inside and outside as permeable as possible, thus connecting the architecture with the landscape.

Students always enter through the large courtyard before heading to their lockers. The courtyard, while offering ample mineral surfaces that can accommodate all the school’s students, integrates numerous planted areas combining mature trees, shrubs, perennials, and wildflowers, all of local origin. The planting area closest to the kitchen/cafeteria serves as a vegetable garden, in the form of an edible forest. Natural rocks scattered here and there serve as benches, barriers, pathways, and transitional elements, allowing students to playfully appropriate the space. The large overhanging roofs of the buildings interconnect to form a continuous covered walkway around the courtyard.

The school must be both simple and complex – simple in its expression and organization, but complex in its spatiality and the richness of its spaces. In section, the classrooms benefit from the roof slope to achieve a generous ceiling height. These slopes extend and meet above the collaboration areas, defining a double-height space. Shared among four classes, the collaboration zone partly unfolds in double height, and partly in a mezzanine accessible by a bleacher stair.

The main pavilion houses the reception, administration, daycare services, and common facilities shared between cycles. The common space unfolds under a generous double height. A stepped area bridges a lower zone directly connected to the courtyard and a more intimate area placed in the mezzanine. From the steps and the mezzanine, a large skylight frames the view of Mount Shefford beyond the roofs and the landscape.

Located in the basement, the gymnasium and its activities can be observed from the common circulation that crosses above. In this widened corridor, fixed furniture elements allow for activities in smaller groups. Transparency provides constant visual contact with the forest.

The classrooms, with their generous openings, are designed to avoid the need for mechanical air conditioning. The overhangs of the roofs help control summer radiation and minimize solar gains. Punctuating each pavilion, large triangular chimneys generously allow zenithal light to enter. These chimneys also collectively serve as a bioclimatic device, with the shape of the roofs naturally directing warm air towards these shafts, where it can be evacuated.

Without literally reproducing the vernacular architecture of the surrounding area, the school, with its low volumes and sloped roofs, offers archetypal forms that echo the nearby houses or farm buildings. Thus, children enter a world that is familiar to them; a warm and welcoming world.

École du Zénith in Shefford, Canada – Building Information

Architects: Pelletier de Fontenay – https://pelletierdefontenay.com/ + Leclerc

Name: École du Zénith
Client: Centre de Service Scolaire Val-des-Cerfs
Landscape Architecture: Agent Relic Design
Structure: Lateral Conseil
Civil: Gravitaire
Electromechanical: BPA
Photos: James Brittain

About Pelletier de Fontenay
Pelletier de Fontenay is a Montreal-based architectural studio, founded in 2010 by Hubert Pelletier and Yves de Fontenay. The studio has a strong design focus and is currently developing a series of public projects, including museums, schools, cultural centers, and libraries.

The studio also engages in the design of private residences, housing, pavilions, exhibitions, and urban planning. This variety of project type and scale fosters exploration of a wide range of ideas, typologies, and building approaches.
Rather than developing a specific style, or a predefined formal language, the studio’s approach is based on the principle that different conditions produce different expressions.

Pelletier de Fontenay projects are conceived by postponing the vision of a finished product for as long as possible, instead placing trust in the creative process as the generator of architecture that is always distinctive. Designs are developed by navigating the tension between the internal and external forces of the project. On the one hand, the studio approaches architecture as an autonomous system and works with typological and historical models and references. On the other hand, there is the conviction that project specificities are always generative. The negotiation between these two perspectives produces architectural objects that are rigorous, but always contextual.

Photographer: James Brittain

Maison Shefford, Québec, Canada images / information received 260524 from v2com newswire

Location: Shefford, Québec, Canada

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