La Pêche’s new town hall is a 2-storey, highly energy-efficient building with a very low intrinsic and operational carbon footprint. It is also the first institutional building in Quebec to be a candidate for Passivhaus certification.

Located at the gateway to the municipality of 8,600 inhabitants, it fronts onto provincial highway 366, just across from Chemin du Lac Philippe, one of the main access points to Gatineau Park. It houses a classic program: lobby and reception area, tax payment counter, permit consultation counter, council chamber, multi-purpose room, meeting rooms, kitchenette and lunch area, rest area, as well as a combination of closed and open-plan offices. The building has a surface area of 1,417 sq.m.

The large south-facing facade, designed according to passive solar principles, offers a panoramic view of the Gatineau Park hills. The facade is largely glazed and features a structural wood curtain wall whose rhythm and bracing elements echo the traditional structures of the region’s covered bridges. In the evening, the warmth of the CLT roof and the details of the all-wood curtain wall are enhanced by a strategy of direct and indirect lighting.

This town hall stands out for 3 reasons:

1. It is made almost entirely of wood, a local resource that has historically strengthened the region’s economy.

The structure features glulam beams and columns, and cross-laminated timber (CLT) floors and roofs. All interior partitions and exterior wall assemblies are of light timber frame construction. Wall insulation is a combination of blown-in cellulose and wood-fibre panels. Exterior siding is eastern cedar installed on wood furring.

Windows and doors are wood with aluminum cladding on the exterior. Inside, the baseboards are maple, and the reception furniture, including the tax payment and permit consultation counters, also incorporate wood in their design. The building is thus a major carbon sink.

2. It is designed to the international Passivhaus energy-efficiency standard, which saves 65% of heating and cooling energy when compared with the – raised – standards in force since 2021.

It is the first institutional building in Quebec to apply for Passivhaus certification. Achieving the standard depends on a number of factors, the main ones being: the building’s simple form and advantageous envelope/floor area ratio, superior wall and roof insulation, precise positioning of windows according to orientation, exceptional air tightness – validated by mandatory blower door tests – and key architectural components certified by the German Passivhaus Institute.

In Quebec’s climate, the Passivhaus approach calls for careful regulation of solar radiation inside the building. At the La Pêche town hall, a double south-facing brise soleil was precisely designed to cut solar radiation in summer, drastically reducing air-conditioning needs, while maximizing solar gain in winter. In fact, the building’s main source of heating during the coldest months is direct solar radiation.

3. The structural design of the roof spans 18m without beams, joists, or intermediate supports. Panels of 175mm-thick, 5-ply cross-laminated timber (CLT) are connected to each other in a saw-tooth pattern.

They create multiple gables that evoke the roofs of the area’s covered bridges, notably the one located directly opposite City Hall on Chemin du Lac-Philippe, one of the main entrances to Gatineau Park. From a technical point of view, the CLT slabs – inclined towards each other at a 40-degree angle – work bidirectionally, taking advantage of CLT’s structural capacity in both directions, analogous to a deep caisson.

Historically, this typology has been exploited in concrete framing to create so-called folded plate structures, but it is under-utilized in timber framing. In addition to their aesthetic appeal and structural logic, these long spans make it possible to avoid columns altogether on the second floor, to open up the magnificent view of the Gatineau Park hills, and to offer great flexibility in interior layouts for the entire life of the building.

The project won the Cecobois 2025 award in the sustainable development category and a Prix d’excellence 2025 from the Ordre des architectes du Québec.