Lauremont School Elgin Mills Campus

The two-part Lauremont School Elgin Mills Campus addition involves the creation of a purposed designed spaces for the grade 7 and 8 students and a new dining hall. The two-storey middle school addition includes three classrooms per level, along with breakout spaces and teacher support areas. It is access by a new entrance and central skylit feature staircase interconnecting the levels. The buildings exterior features a layered exoskeleton mass timber structural system consisting of a mix of fan-shaped, curved, and straight timber columns that run parallel to the facade of the building.

The arrangement of the fan columns recalls the positive ambiguity of consonance and dissonance found in music, in which a listener has the impression of both constancy and tranquillity (consonance) and motion and tension (dissonance), depending on the composition of tones and notes. This creates constant back and forth between consonance and dissonance, giving both shape and a sense of direction to the exterior and interior learning spaces through increased and decreased harmonic tension.

The design of the Elgin Mills Montessori School continues our exploration of Attention Restoration Theory, in which attention, concentration, and focus can be reinvigorated by engaging with nature, natural settings, or environments with natural materials and forms. In these types of places, our mind shifts from a voluntary focus to an involuntary focus. As we know, involuntary focus is very important in restoring and re-energizing voluntary attention, which we use for tasks like learning.

The dining hall is a two-storey rectangular building positioned next to a new exterior courtyard featuring birch trees and fern gardens, separating the new building from the existing one. Its ceiling is supported by six multi-stemmed timber column groupings, each consisting of three diagonally oriented straight columns arranged in a triangular plan. As the columns rise to the ceiling, they branch out into two secondary timber columns. Each primary column grouping is also mirrored by the column grouping opposite it, creating a fractal interplay.

Similar to the new atrium lobby at the Lauremont School Bayview Campus, the relationship between the straight, triangular, and curved forms of the dining hall enhances feelings of positive ambiguity. Our eyes follow the subtle shifts and changing arrangements of similar but different forms to create a sense of perpetual motion and growth.