Marine Drive Academy

Perched on a steep site with dramatic views of Sheet Harbour, the three-storey, 64,000-square-foot Marine Drive Academy is a context-specific design that challenges traditional school typologies.

The Academy serves approximately 270 students from pre-primary through grade 12 and surrounding communities on the province’s rural Eastern Shore. It stands as a much-needed beacon for the area with the mandate to foster an environment for learning, equity, social value, and sustainability.

The school is organized around multiple activity areas located prominently in the heart of the school. Makerspaces, active living, performance zone, and community learning and library spaces work together to encourage creativity and discovery as part of the learning process.

The Academy’s makerspaces consist of areas for sewing machines, filmmaking tools, and messy activities—all flexible spaces for discovery. The performance zone houses drama and music rooms, and acoustically separated practice rooms.

The school also prioritizes wellness with active living areas including the gym, a fitness studio, a weight room, sports fields, and private youth health space.

Widened corridors create an informal library space—students are constantly exposed to books to make reading a more integral part of their day-to-day. As an unintended benefit, the wider corridors have enabled social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Corridors are generally bright and flooded with daylight from clerestory windows and interior glazing, bringing in more natural light for reading, collaborating, or playing.

Classrooms at the Academy are smaller—765-square-feet—than the provincial standard as so much learning happens elsewhere in the plan. This project understands that learning and recreation are not mutually exclusive, and that school can be a natural extension of students’ lives in linking to broader community values.