Twenty + Change: BoON Architecture

01.10.2024 11:17

A multi-use wood-frame building in Montmagny, Quebec, includes a private courtyard designed to optimize daylight and natural ventilation for residents. A ground-level commercial space addresses the main throughfare, and parking is tucked under the back volume.

Quebec City-based BoON Architecture began as a residential studio in 2016. According to associate Jean-Nicolas Bouchard, who joined in 2021, this still informs the way the team approaches the now larger and more complex projects they take on: they listen, they work together, and they take action (“l’écoute, la collaboration, l’action”). As a young firm, they welcome working within constraints to realize big ideas for small budgets, but they’ve also established themselves enough that prospective clients are already on-board with their eco-design ethos.

Environmentally sustainable architecture is at the core of BoON Architecture’s mission. The team works to consciously mitigate risks like toxicity, flooding, and forest fire damage, and to reduce the ecological impact of their projects. Of BoON’s sixteen studio members, four have LEED credentials, four have Passive House certification, and four more have completed Passive House training; the studio as a whole is B Corp certified.

Bouchard explains that their focus goes beyond energy models and carbon calculations, by considering the inherently social dimension of the environment—embracing a contextual, holistic, and multi-scalar approach. Their design method is, as he puts it, one of “empirical creativity.”

Le Jardin d’Hiver is a demountable vault that is seasonally deployed in the courtyard of a popular Quebec City bar.

Part of this is embracing a scientific approach—observe, analyze, hypothesize, test, iterate—to deliver a better result within budget. The BoON team is careful to quantify the added value of quality details and ecological strategies. Bouchard is confident that as more rigorous sustainability requirements become part of planning regulations, “BoON will be ready.” He says that tools such as upfront carbon analysis allow the firm’s architects to think empirically, while also freeing them to focus on the cultural role of projects, and to more clearly see opportunities for fun and beauty in their designs.

Named La Cime—french for “the treetop”—this 20-square-metre A-frame refuge echoes the form of neighbouring evergreens. Built to accommodate four guests, the second floor includes nest-like bed alcoves with sweeping mountain views.

As BoON Architecture grows its portfolio, it’s taking on work in a wider range of sectors and building up toward public contracts. It currently has projects under development across Quebec in recreational tourism, public space, and artisanal food production.

PHILIPPE LABBÉE, MARILYN LEMIEUX-JOLIN, ARIANE MOREAU, JEANNE PELLETIER, ROSE DEMERS, JULIE BRADETTE, ANN-FRÉDÉRIC BROCHET, JEAN-NICOLAS BOUCHARD, GABRIEL FAGGION, SARAH-LOU GAGNON-VILLENEUVE, BRUNO VERGE, VICTORIA DESLANDES-LYON

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives.

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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