Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

The side of the Ecole Allain St. Cyr building offers a look at its many high windows and its unique colour scheme, designed to allow students to easily find their way around.

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Ecole Allain St. Cyr was recently selected by a Berlin-based publishing house as one of the top 1,000 recently erected buildings in the Americas.

The school, housing 108 students from kindergarten to Grade 12, was chosen by Braun Publishing for its book "1000 X Architecture of the Americas," an immense, four-inch thick coffee table book profiling 1,000 outstanding buildings in North, Central and South America.

Yellowknife's only all-francophone school is the northern-most building in the world to make the list, one of only two schools in Canada included. Other buildings in the book include houses, wineries, churches, studios, condominiums, gyms, convention centres and government buildings located everywhere from the United States to Mexico to Uruguay.

"I'm in very good company," said Wayne Guy, the Yellowknife architect who began designing the school in 1999. "The thing that's amazing about designing in the NWT is that, most of the time, you're dealing with virgin sites, whereas in cities you're essentially just filling in between blocks."

As noted by Braun, Ecole Allain St-Cyr is the first school in Canada to use displacement ventilation to meet the needs of hypoallergenic children.

But it's the building's incorporation of its natural environment that makes it stand out.

"To keep in mind the beauty that you've displaced is extremely important," said Guy. "We kept all of the trees within a metre of the building and we sloped the main floor with a series of ramps up the rock so we didn't have to blast.

"We didn't have to alter the topography, which made the building look like it always belonged there."

A large yellow rotunda at the front of the building serves as a meeting place and assembly hall for students. Guy was inspired by the colour of the leaves on nearby birch trees, which blend seamlessly with the building in the fall.

"We actually took a leaf and picked an acrylic colour to match," he said of the rotunda's yellow exterior.

The rotunda features windows piled on top of each other, starting at the floor, in the shape of a pyramid or Olympic podium.

When conceptualizing the project, Guy's inclinations veered towards two things: satisfying the practical demands of the school's staff and students, and avoiding the patterns of older schools, like the Montreal elementary school he went to.

"It was like a jail," said Guy. "It was a one-storey brick building, a paved playground. It had a linear, raceway sort of a corridor with hard materials that sort of clamoured. It was mayhem between classes. A jungle. There's no way you could hear somebody else talk."

While he didn't become interested in architecture until his late teens, Guy said his former halls of learning, especially his high school, made a lasting impression.

His high school locker room was in the basement - dark, dingy and smelly.

"An architect came in and turned it into a fabulous library with skylights to bring a lot of light in, nice little sitting niches," said Guy. "That's when I realized for the first time in my life that through design one can significantly enhance the day-to-day experience of a place."

At Ecole Allain St. Cyr, the hallways are more than just vessels for the delivery of students from one class to the next. They include auxiliary spaces with tables and high windows on the opposite side of the lockers, used between classes for conversations or during class for separating students in different grades, in the case of split classes.

"I make the analogy that, if you look at space like a river, you want to create lakes," he said. "You want to create nice, smooth, tranquil environments for people to contemplate in."

Colour plays a key role in the school, too. Younger children's lockers differ in colour - red, green or yellow, depending on their grade - and can be clearly viewed from outside.

"It enables students to find their own way and lessens the needs for adult supervision and fosters independence," said Guy.

Guy counts the school as one his proudest achievements.

"How we gauge success is by the enjoyment people get out of our building, not whether they're published or not," said Guy. "Certainly in my visits to the school recently, I'm really tickled to see it's still a very animated, vibrant environment for kids to learn in."

Acting principal Julie Giachino likes to watch for foxes outside the window of Allain St. Cyr's back stairwell.

"Often in schools there aren't many windows and there isn't a lot of light. All the natural light - that's what struck me when I first walked in here," she said. "Sometimes, if your students are particularly excited, you can turn the lights out but still get some natural light. The kids can still work and it gives off a calming feeling."

She remembers the elementary school she attended in Ottawa as a "brown, brick building ... with few windows. Certainly not this space."

But she's not the only one who gets to enjoy her second home; both her young children attend Allain St. Cyr.

"At that age, that's what I knew," she said of her childhood school. "That's what a school was. I think it's only once we see schools like this that we think, 'Well, it would have been nice to have that chance.' But now my kids have it. So that's great."