BRUJ Residence, Québec interior real estate, Canadian residential architecture, photos

BRUJ Residence in Quebec City

26 June 2024

Architectes: Studio Jean Verville architectes

Location: Abraham Park, Québec City, Canada

photo © Antoine Michel

Photos: Maryse Béland, Maxime Brouillet and Antoine Michel

BRUJ Interior, Canada

Now dividing his time between practice and teaching at the School of Architecture of Laval University in Quebec City, architect Jean Verville, appealed by the brutalist architecture punctuating the national capital with significant buildings, established his creative laboratory in a residential tower, designed in the 1970’s by architect Marcel Bilodeau, and standing out as a monumental sculpture facing the Plains of Abraham Park.

photos © Maryse Béland

The rehabilitation of BRUJ, a compact 79sqm unit is deployed in an architectural experiment orchestrating a space with a graphic dimension. Like an observation post offering breathtaking views of the Laurentian Mountains, the urban landscape, and the St Lawrence River, the interior comes alive with an immutable body-to-body relationship between transparency and reflection, while transforming realities through distancing and multiplication.

photo © Maryse Béland

First, a complete curettage prescribed by a necessary upgrading. Thus, freed from all construction systems and obsolete equipment, the unit reveals a monolith of raw concrete, pierced with openings to the north and south.

photo © Maxime Brouillet

Taking advantage of the crossing typology, the mineral materiality, the natural luminosity, and the electromechanical systems essential to the functioning of the habitable space, an architectural device, formed of a serial composition of sliding glass walls, allows fluid reconfigurations, while thwarting perceptions of size. The strategic positioning of domestic equipment maintains constant physical and visual permeability to neutralize the compactness of the unit.

photo © Maryse Béland

The modular spatial organization system divides the volumetric entity by structuring mobile boundaries associated with the interchangeability of equipment in order to meet the requirements of organizational and functional adaptability, while maintaining visual porosity. By addition or subtraction, this flexible system fragments the plan into 6 layout alternatives with undetermined functions, offering up to 7 distinct sub-spaces, while flexible blinds with a metallic finish allow the option of openwork borders, as well as total privacy.

photo © Maryse Béland

The project is based on a reasoned use of materials and components with the aim of limiting resources, types of interventions, and costs. In order to reduce the carbon footprint relating to energy consumption for heating and air conditioning, the proposal uses the thermal inertia of the concrete shell, absorbing both heat of the winter solar radiation and summer night coolness, and then redistributes them gently. While the transversality of the unit and the modular sliding wall system allow a multitude of combinations, they also promote natural ventilation optimizing comfort in summer.

photos © Maryse Béland

Interacting with reflective, transparent, and metallic surfaces, the multiple reverberations of light create kinetic lighting animating the entire space with plays of light and shadow. Industrial elements, such as unloading dock lamps or commercial restaurant furniture, come together in an eclectic ensemble evoking the alchemist’s laboratory, transforming reality into fiction.

photo © Maxime Brouillet

Glass vials of all kinds, models and various explorations, utilitarian objects, and plants rub shoulders on the shelves, revisiting the spirit of the cabinet of curiosities in a playful presentation of everyday life.

photos © Maryse Béland

BRUJ Interior in Quebec City, Canada – Building Information

Architect: Studio Jean Verville architectes – https://jeanverville.com/

Project: BRUJ
Client: Jean Verville
Year(s) of construction: 2023-2024
Use: habitable creative laboratory
Area: 79 sqm
Studio Jean Verville architectes team
Jean Verville, architect – lead designer
Gabriel Ladouceur, studio coordinator, professional and scientific MA architecture candidate

Guillaume Turgeon Solis, technical specialist France Goneau, artistic advisor Tania Paula Garza Rico, architect

photo © Maxime Brouillet

Special collaborations: Loïc Bard (art furniture) and France Goneau (ceramic sculptures)

Photos: Maryse Béland, Maxime Brouillet and Antoine Michel

Contractor: Nomad construction (Quebec City)

photo © Maryse Béland

About Jean Verville, PhD art, architect
Jean Verville uses play, humor, and self-mockery in both his professional practice and his teaching approach. In parallel with his teaching activities and his professional practice, Jean Verville pursues a research and creative approach that questions the otherness and intersubjectivity that shape our understanding of our environments. His proposals illustrate issues and positions specific to today’s visual culture, with its values and preoccupations. With apparent casualness, Jean Verville presents a reflection on spatiality, and on architecture’s capacity to distract from a well-regulated routine through a metamorphosis of the everyday. Observing the impact of popular culture, Verville proposes playful interactions inviting individual appropriations to highlight the formal attributes, and the collective and collaborative dimensions of architectural space, while celebrating the multiplicity of perceptions.

photo © Maxime Brouillet

Studio Jean Verville architectes
The complementary skills of the members of the multidisciplinary team contribute to the variability of the Studio’s production by integrating a gamification of the project development process through playful collaboration with clients and the team responsible for the production. The objective is as much the development of universes adapted to the personalities of their clients and their particular needs, as an individualization of the design and production stages in a collective reflection on the relationship to space, and on the role and capacity of architecture to transform everyday life.

Currently, the team is working on the development of an art and nature co-housing project, an extension to an architectural work by Jacques Bilodeau, and an artists studio in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine.

photo © Maryse Béland

Jean Verville, Associate Professor
School of Architecture of Laval University, Quebec City, QC, Canada
In addition to teaching at the professional and scientific master’s level, as well as at the doctorate level, Professor Jean Verville directs the Speculative architecture laboratory. Funded by Laval University and the Quebec Research Fund – Society and Culture, the laboratory team explores the power of narrative evocation of architecture to activate a collective speculative vision. The approach calls for new ways of conveying ideas, combining multiple expertises, and fostering transdisciplinary reflection in order to imagine innovative and hopeful ethical devices. This approach, which legitimizes abstract thinking, aims to develop alternative scenarios, influenced by current and future issues, and to push back current limits while assessing their impact on space, cultures, and communities. Experimentation with participative, performative, and socially engaged architectural proposals is a fundamental principle.

photos © Maryse Béland

Photographers: Maryse Béland, Maxime Brouillet and Antoine Michel

BRUJ Interior, Québec City, Canada images / information received 260624 from v2com newswire

Location: Abraham Park, Québec City, Canada

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