Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

NNSL (Dec 11/98) - For the past 10 years, Ecole Allain St. Cyr has been housed in several portables, a situation that was only supposed to have lasted their first year in operation.

And though francophone educators have turned the cramped little trailer-schoolhouse into a vibrant learning centre, the arrangement was beginning to wear thin. Parents and teachers have had plenty of time to think of what they might want in a school if one was ever built.

"The French community wanted something special," says Wayne Guy, the architect who designed the new school. "It (good design) takes a client with a vision and I would say they had a lot of vision."

But it turns out Guy wasn't just designing a school. He was also to incorporate into the design a meeting place for the francophone community as well as a location for the French day care Plein Soleil.

Another challenge was the site: a narrow slice of land with a steep gradient and lots of trees, adjacent to the large brick William McDonald school.

Rather then levelling the site, Guy designed a rotunda -- a round building -- to fit into the depression, with the classroom part of the building a long extension out from it.

"Because of the very narrow site, it's a long, slender building," explains Guy. "And the rotunda, the circular form, is seen as public space."

The rectangular roof of the classroom portion comes up over the rotunda, merging the two sections.

"The landscape rolls to the south and the roof slants in the opposite direction, as a counterpoint to the landscape," Guy says.

Besides the shapes and movement of the building and working with the lines of the surroundings, the colours Guy and his clients have chosen reflect the colours of the natural world just outside the many large ground-level windows.

"The colours echo the landscape," Guy explains. "The roof will be a deep, deep blue like the Northern sky. The rotunda will be a viennese yellow like the colour of fall birch leaves and the base will be grey, picking up the grey of the rock from which the building rises."

Regarding interior space, the rotunda will house the day care at ground level, the multi-purpose community hall on the second level and the school library on the third level.

The community hall will have many uses -- it can be an amphitheatre (theatre in the round or standard proscenium) or lecture hall, with raked seating accommodating 215 people. It can also be divided, with partitions, into three separate rooms.

The design of the classrooms themselves and of the long hallways alongside them were inspired by thinking of how oil and vinegar mix: little bubbles breaking away from big bubbles. This inspiration came after talking through, with his clients, the way space is set up.

"We wanted breakout space off the classrooms. There are volunteer teachers, a lot of community involvement. This way, the teacher can supervise from the classroom," says Guy.

Across the hall from the windowed classroom, there are triangular spaces jutting out from the building, again with large windows, but set up to impede the view of the brick- face wall of the other school while maintaining the view of the natural wooded landscape.

"They can also be impromptu gathering spaces for the students," adds Guy.

What does principal Julie Bouchard think of the design?

Bouchard loves it; she thinks it's exceptional.

"A lot of schools were built in Edmonton over the last eight or nine years, a lot of beautiful schools... But nothing like this one."

"The children are so excited. They want to see it. We visit every two months to see how it's coming along," says Bouchard.

According to the principal of this 56-student school, the children were quite worried about what would happen with their old school so she's slowly had to introduce them to the new one so they could make it their own.

What do the kids think of the new school?

"It looks cool," exclaims one student as the rest of the young crowd nod their head in approval.

And the school, which is slated for completion in May with a summer move-in planned, certainly does look cool. Especially the bridge and moat set-up that serves as an entrance into the grand front hall.