At Stadacona School in Quebec City, students get a lesson in good design

Open this photo in gallery:

It’s morning recess at Stadacona School, and a rowdy game of kickball is taking off by the front entrance. A group of primary-schoolers sends a ball careering off the yellow-brick walls and into the Quebec City school’s front door.

This area of the brand-new school building wasn’t designed for play; its overhang is meant to give shelter to students as they walk in and park their bikes, or to hang out on the circular bench. Still, the building’s architect, Jerome Lapierre, isn’t concerned.

“It was important to have an openness both to the neighbourhood and the schoolyard,” he explained as we passed through the glass front doors.

The school’s outer walls mix yellow brick with a green metal that evokes the weathered copper of a nearby church spire – a friendly, Modernist spin on the local architectural language. Those materials wrap a set of boxes that stack like a whimsical pile of Lego.

This handsome, playful composition is the first building to be realized by Lab-École, a not-for-profit that aims to improve school conditions in Quebec.

“In our society, we don’t perceive the value of design,” said Pierre Thibeault, a prominent architect who is one of Lab-École’s volunteer leaders. “Here, very simply, we think it’s possible to create a good environment for teachers and students – and that we must.”

Founded in 2017, the organization is seeing the fruits of its work: In addition to Stadacona, five schools are now being built or rebuilt following design competitions led by Lab-École.

This work has major implications for public policy. Provincial governments spend hundreds of millions annually on school construction and renovation – Alberta has budgeted $2.3-billion over the next three years, for instance.

But across Canada, there is much work to be done. The last major wave of school construction was 50 years ago, and those buildings need work. In Quebec, the backlog of repairs in public school buildings is $27-billion, according to Dominique Laflamme, director-general of Lab École. In Ontario, that number in 2021 was $16.8-billion.

In the past two generations, the architecture of public schools – as with public buildings in general – has declined steeply in quality. Construction budgets are low; architecture fees even lower. Innovation is rare. So is pride.

Which makes Stadacona a welcome surprise. Its spaces are comfortable, beautifully detailed and full of welcome surprises.

The front door is the meeting point for the building’s two wings. To the east, a four-storey wing hugs the street; this holds the gym, arts classrooms, dining area and library-auditorium that includes a demonstration kitchen. Older students attend class on the top floors. The other wing juts out to the south, combining daycare and primary-school classrooms with a broad, sunlit “learning corridor” that overlooks the schoolyard.

Open this photo in gallery:

A visit with Mr. Lapierre and Lab-École staff began outside. The schoolyard sits on a hillside overlooking the St. Charles River, and built-in slides take advantage of the topography. Further along the hill, raucous students sledded down a designated area of the slope.

“It snows a lot, and we wanted something that would make the kids want to go outside anyway,” Ms. Laflamme explained.

Other kids raced up a staircase to the third floor of the building, where a rooftop terrace offered its own territory for ballgames and active play on a built-in slope. The bell rang, and we followed the students inside to a cloakroom lined with birch plywood; the kids found places for their outdoor gear before heading back to class.

Next came the upper-grade classrooms and their shared gathering space. Two students read quietly in an enclosed booth, framed by an arch of birch plywood.

Downstairs was the gym: half-sunken to save space, with windows on two sides and an upper-level gallery for spectators. We passed through the library, where kids nested into nooks in the walls with their picture books, and the test kitchen – open for public events after hours, and easily accessible from the front doors.

Open this photo in gallery:

The logic of this sequence was no accident. Mr. Lapierre designed the facility in close consultation with the Lab-École team and with school staff.

“The process was to sit everybody at the table – janitors, the municipality, the people in charge of child care – and ask them: ‘What do you want your school to be like?’” Ms. Laflamme explained.

The resulting building is 30-per-cent larger than the provincial ministry standard, and cost about $25-million to build. The school board, the Centre de services scolaire de la Capitale, estimates this cost at 15-per-cent to 20-per-cent more than that of a conventional school build.

Is that a lot? Mr. Thibeault counters that the usual budgets are much too low. This argument could equally apply to schools in Ontario or Alberta, where a school and an industrial warehouse have similar budgets. In addition, the Lab-École team makes an appeal to long-term efficiency: Modest upfront costs are negligible over the life of such a building, in which most of the expense (and the benefit) stretches out over half a century.

But the biggest question is: What does that extra few million dollars buy? Anecdotally it seems clear that a school with comfortable, well-proportioned rooms, adequate natural light and extra space that teachers can use is going to be a better place to learn. On this, the school’s director, Chantale Poirier, seemed quite clear: “We are really using it well,” she said in French. The library’s test kitchen had recently been used by one of the junior classes for a lesson – baking with fractions!

In 2025, academic research will provide more precise information. A team led by two education professors at the Université du Québec à Montréal is studying the impact of the first six Lab-École buildings on students’ well-being and academic success. Colleagues from four other universities in Quebec, France and Switzerland are collaborating on the study, which will use questionnaires, interviews, physiological data and video recordings. Data are being collected before and after students occupy the new school facilities, of which Stadacona is the first.

Open this photo in gallery:

In any case, thus far, Quebec’s Ministry of Education seems convinced in the worth of the project. Under the current government, five more Lab-École schools are in construction, across the province from Gatineau to Rimouski. These have been designed by a range of architecture firms from unknowns to established corporate firms, joined through a two-stage design competition process.

Each of these designs involves a degree of spatial and formal experimentation, and most involve high-quality materials; the school in Shefford in the Eastern Townships, designed by Pelletier de Fontenay and Leclerc architectes, is made principally of mass timber. All this is extraordinarily far from the process and product of school design in most of the country, which is brutally utilitarian.

Mr. Thibeault says the work of the past six years has not always been easy. A large organization such as a provincial ministry “is not set up to innovate,” he said. But an independent, empowered group of thinkers can make change: “We need a lab not only for schools but also for elders, for kindergartens, for hospitals.”

Imagine: Public places that aim for beauty, creativity and room to play.