Nicolas Labrie

Nicolas Labrie is an architect, WELL Accredited Professional, ANFA member, and founder of LabNco, an architecture practice based in Quebec, Canada. Trained first as an architectural technologist and later as an architect at Université Laval, he has accumulated more than 19 years of experience across residential, cultural, institutional, commercial, and experiential projects.

His work explores architecture as a science of human experience, at the intersection of neuroarchitecture, wellness, sensory perception, human behavior, and the emotional memory of places. Guided by the idea that “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” Nicolas is interested in how the built environment can influence attention, stress, relationships, habits, belonging, health, and human flourishing.

Raised by a cabinetmaker father, he developed early sensitivity to the relationship between subjective ideas and the tangible world. This continues to shape his desire to place scientific rigor in service of human vision: to see the world through other people’s eyes, and through the eyes of the world itself.

Through LabNco, Nicolas focuses especially on everyday environments — homes, housing, and the ordinary places that form the largest and most constant part of our built surroundings. While he remains deeply interested in museums, retreats, and exceptional cultural spaces, he believes ordinary environments deserve extraordinary care because they shape the daily conditions of life, lifestyle, dignity, and long-term health.

His broader work seeks to move architecture beyond intuition alone, toward evidence-informed, empathic, participatory, and continuously validated design processes supported by data, feedback, and emerging technologies. Nicolas previously taught “Human Aspects of Architecture” at Université Laval. MB Japan will be his third Moving Boundaries program, after the first edition and Nordic X, reflecting his ongoing desire to bridge architecture, neuroscience, culture, and embodied experience.