The Study School

Located in a former mansion on the slopes of Mount Royal, The Study School has offered bilingual education for girls from Kindergarten to Secondary V since 1915. The campus will soon benefit from the complete redevelopment of its outdoor spaces, as part of a masterplan we’ve designed to redefine the schoolyard as a place of learning, exchange, and play. Our scheme prioritizes physical health and connections to nature to best serve the development of the students.  

Constraints posed by the configuration of existing buildings and topography were resolved by design and programming strategies adapted to the different uses, as well as to the specific age-related needs of students. New outdoor spaces are being created for teaching science, arts, and physical education: the different terraced levels will include a stone garden, a vegetable garden, a theater, and an athletics track. In the north and south courtyards, dynamic play areas will take advantage of the site's natural slopes by introducing slides, bleachers, and climbing games. Preserving and enhancing the abundant planted areas will create shaded spaces for discovering flora and inspiring conversations.

Across the site, refined plantings will decorate the new spaces with successive blooms throughout the changing seasons. Trilliums, anemones, forget-me-nots, and tulips will create a colorful scene in spring, along with blossoming saskatoon trees. Later, alliums will accompany roses, aerial astilbes, and hydrangeas, then in the fall the colors of maple, birch, serviceberry and oak trees will welcome back the students. During winter, the deep greens of yew and spruce trees will contrast the red hues of holly berries and dogwood stems.

Due to the school’s siting on the mountain, a solution to the abundant rainwater runoff that is causing damage to the school and buildings downhill had to be integrated as a critical element of the project. An area of the site is therefore reserved for a verdant rain garden that will hold and filter runoff, while also serving as an educational tool. Together with a stormwater retention basin under the lower lawn, and a complex system of below-ground channels, these important interventions will help to drain the site in a managed way.

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Our masterplan for The Study School campus in Westmount is being constructed in phases, in order to disrupt students’ learning as little as possible. Phase 1 was completed in 2021 and encompassed the area around the main entrance into the school, which is set back between two pavilions and faces a steeply sloping residential street. Due to the grade, access to the subterranean parking garage runs beneath the raised walkway leading to the front doors and was built too close to the property line. Previously, this had resulted in an abnormally steep and awkward staircase that joined the sidewalk.

To solve this technical spatial jumble, we worked with a structural engineer to thread a more gracious and elegant staircase above the structure. Modulated landings and a neater resolution with the angled sidewalk, plus a revision of the ramped access further up the hill, has created a much more pleasant arrival sequence for even the youngest students.

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Areas and embankments in-between the stone pathways are planted with species carefully selected to bloom or present colors during key moments of the academic year. Majestic oak trees flank both sides of the entrance. Mass plantings of hydrangea add profuse blossoms in time to welcome students back in the fall; spruce trees, holly and red twig dogwood provide winter interest; astilbe, geranium, trillium, anemones, roses, forget-me-nots, alliums and tulips offer a variety of hues, and much pollination, throughout the spring and summer.

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Soon to be covered with Virginia creeper, the exposed wall of the parking garage was also carefully reworked to blend into the design and is emblazoned with the school coat of arms to bolster students’ sense of pride in their newly front entrance.

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Team:

Sophie Robitaille  Partner, CSLA, ASLA, AAPQ

Anne Charbit  Associate, Architect, OAQ

Anouk Bergeron  Landscape Architect, AAPQ

Simon Gafner

Nathan Vieira

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Photography © Nanne Springer