- April 16, 2026
This open letter was originally published in French for Le Devoir, on April 14 2026.
Ricardo Larrivée’s documentary on the state of schools in Quebec speaks to me deeply. As an architect who has had the privilege of leading the design of new secondary schools, I want to add my voice to this collective conversation and contribute concretely to solving what is, at its core, a shared challenge.
First, a fundamental observation: the quality of our schools directly participates to educational outcomes. Just as hospital architecture influences recovery time, the spaces where young people learn affect their attention, their motivation, their sense of belonging. Architecture helps condition their future and must support the dedication of our teachers. It doesn’t do everything, but it can amplify everything.
We’ve inherited an aging school building stock: institutions born of the Quiet Revolution, some predating it, worn down and often outdated, requiring major investment just to remain functional.
On the financial side, with an estimated $25 billion infrastructure deficit, it would be unrealistic to think we can rebuild our entire school system from scratch, and difficult to justify environmentally. But acknowledging these limits cannot become an excuse for inaction.
Quite the opposite.
Ricardo Larrivée is sounding an alarm, and I echo that call wholeheartedly. I have always believed that constraint is where creativity finds its greatest expression. That’s why I’m calling on us, as a society, to pause and rethink how we conceive of schools, with both clear eyes and genuine ambition. Let’s innovate in our approach, as we once did in the 1960s. The Quiet Revolution transformed our education system. Let’s refuse, collectively, to remain passive today.
What if we treated every school project as a true community hub?
A library shared with the neighbourhood, sports facilities open to the city, a schoolyard that doubles as a public park. And why not a youth centre built right into its walls? Schools can be alive from morning to evening, at the heart of communities. Places for learning, gathering, and exchange. Places where we grow up together.
Truly integrated spaces, where a single building serves municipal, cultural, and educational needs at once, are not a utopia. It’s a tangible, intelligent, and fiscally responsible response to the challenges we face. Let’s stop thinking of schools as closed systems. Let’s think of them as places of exchange, transmission, and collective pride: open, accessible, profoundly democratic, as Quebec society aspires to be.
We also need the courage to revisit certain programmatic requirements in our schools, not to lower standards, but to get to the essence of the place. Building better with less. The appropriate intervention. Simplifying where possible, investing where it truly matters: in learning environments, in the quality of light, in comfort, in flexible spaces, in the schoolyard.
Let’s raise our ambitions on sustainable development. We have the capacity today to design far more high-performing schools. To create learning environments that are healthier, more ecologically sound, and more economically viable over the long term. Let’s draw on passive ventilation, natural lighting, and other strategies already within our reach. Isn’t this, after all, the legacy we are leaving our children?
Renovate, transform, optimize? Absolutely. But above all, imagine differently, with the real means at our disposal. Using the capacity we’ve long cultivated: building great things with limited resources. We inherited that too. Now it’s our turn to exercise it. Through the projects I’ve been fortunate to be part of, I’ve worked alongside true agents of change. I’ve spoken with brilliant students. And I’ve seen, in concrete terms, how architecture can help build a society.
So yes.
Let’s craft innovative solutions.
Eric Pelletier, Architect Senior Principal, Design OAQ, OAA, FIRAC
Over a career spanning more than thirty years, Eric Pelletier has established himself as an influential voice in institutional and cultural architecture in Canada. Architect Senior Principal – Design at Lemay, he has developed a deep conviction: architecture doesn’t do everything, but it can amplify everything. His projects — whether libraries, high schools, or major cultural facilities such as the Grand Théâtre de Québec and the Bibliothèque du Boisé — reflect an approach centered on human experience, flexible use, and environmental responsibility. A Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, he also teaches at the École d’architecture at Université Laval. For Eric, designing a building means taking part in building a society.