Ottawa Forest and Nature School
Ottawa Forest and Nature School is a purpose-built childcare centre for Andrew Fleck Children’s Services, on a treed site at 411 Corkstown Road in Ottawa’s Greenbelt. Children here spend roughly half the programme day outdoors, in every season. Flux specified the lighting inside and out, working to a building by CSV Architects that won a 2025 Ottawa Urban Design Award in the Urban Infill category.
A colour you can find before you can read
Every age group’s room takes its own colour. The round pendants were ordered in custom RAL finishes rather than stock — red in room 111, blue in room 115, yellow in the third — and each room gets not one pendant but a composed set of four diameters, from twelve inches up to forty-eight. Hung low, the colour reads at a child’s eye level instead of disappearing into the ceiling, and a two-year-old can find their own room without being able to read its name.
An acoustic problem before a lighting one
A room of thirty small children is an acoustic problem before it is a lighting one. Over the communal kitchen and dining tables hang three large Luceplan Silenzio drums — fabric-covered acoustic luminaires ordered in a custom colour to match the room’s furniture — which absorb sound and light the tables at the same time. Edison Lighting and Aaline acoustic fixtures carry the same idea through the other gathering spaces.
The quieter decisions
The quieter decisions do the daily work. A-N-D Orbit globes mark a double-height timber nook; Liteline Sigma2 downlights carry classrooms and corridors, kept soft for nap rooms and low sightlines; a cluster of four round pendants gathers in the small central room; and the circulation is deliberately lit from a higher mounting height than the rooms it connects, so moving between spaces reads as a change.
The light follows them outside
Outside, the light follows the children into the yard. Cree Lighting exterior fixtures, Aluminous and Visual Comfort Modern Collection wall and step lights pick out the entries, the deck and the paths after dark. Emergency and exit lighting covers life safety to code, held up by an LVS emergency power control, and the whole floor runs on a Lutron Vive wireless system — daylight and occupancy sensors with tuned levels, so the light steps down for nap time and back up for pick-up without anyone touching a switch.
Design by CSV Architects
Photography by Kevin Belanger.
