445 - Educational buildings 2

The building designed by Jörg Friedrich from the Hamburg office PFP Architekten occupies a deteriorated urban lot. The most interesting element of the project is how it has been inserted into the historic centre of the city, producing an active and positive testimonial to the regeneration of the city using contemporary forms and spaces. As a public building symbolically projected toward the future the school becomes both a physical and ethical reference for the re-appropriation of the city by its inhabitants. An original relationship with the site employs free geometries overlapping a stone base, which firmly anchors the project to the pattern of streets. This intense relationship is further demonstrated by the physical relationship with the Church of Santa Maria del Suffragio, with which the school is functionally linked: the former liturgical hall will soon become the auditorium and library of the entire scholastic complex.

This project involves the renovation of a former brick furnace in Riccione, constructed in 1908 and decommissioned in 1970. The 40,000 m2 site is occupied by approximately 3,400 m2 of covered area.Pellegrini maintained the form of the original volumes to host a high school of 18 classrooms for 450 students. The project conserves the memory of the site and, to minimise the impact on the environment and the use of land, privileges the substitution of existing structures with new energy efficient buildings. The pursuit of a policy of energy savings is also evident in the search for locally available materials. The value of the project is poetically expressed precisely through an idea of the new born on the old. The design employs a contemporary language that does not however overshadow the memory of the past; it does not require daring and abstruse forms, because it is fully aware of the value of tradition.

This school for the community of Zugliano is as particular as it is typologically clear: a simple square plan with an open central ‘heart’ wrapped by various functions, juxtaposed against an articulated roof characterised by overlapping steel pitches of differing geometries and dimensions. The school in Zugliano offers an original approach to a link with the local territory, evoking the role of the courtyard typology to offer a space of encounter for the community. Its role as a building at the service of the community is rendered physical by the roof, which also enters into a plastic relationship with the surrounding landscape. Architecture overcomes a simple reading of its physical context and opts for a dialogue with the more stimulating natural topography surrounding the site of the new school.

This project is situated in the Town of Seriate, a few kilometres from Bergamo, in an industrial area of small businesses immersed in the urban fabric of this small settlement. In particular, the project site is located inside the larger complex of the Scuola Edile di Bergamo, a variegated collection of buildings constructed over the past fifty years, with a range of functions including an auditorium, workshops, offices and classrooms. In terms of program, the project focused on creating a Multipurpose Centre, complementary to and supporting the existing school, increasing its spaces and services. The new building is surgically grafted onto the existing system, and its volumes modelled to respect its surroundings. Views, circulation, projections, the use of materials and the interior layout of functions inside the Multipurpose Centre were studied to establish a dialogue between new and existing.

This new elementary school inaugurated last April in Montecarotto, designed by the Ancona based office Mondaini Roscani Architetti Associati, was completed on time and exactly on budget. The site of the school stands at the edge of the small fortified town of Montecarotto, already home to a municipal gymnasium and nursery school. With the planned construction of a high school, the area is slated to become the town’s scholastic campus. The dominant theme of the project is the splendid hillside landscape viewed from the site, with which the architects establish a dialogue. The building is an elongated two storey rectangle. The closed, grey and massive southern façade is perforated by a series of small square randomly placed openings. To the north, on the contrary, an orange surface with generous windows opens up toward the landscape.

This primary school in Chiarano, a small town of less than four thousand residents situated between Treviso and Pordenone, was inaugurated in 2013. The school was designed to be an urban centrality, characterised by the use of bright colours and the intention to provide spaces to the local community outside of school hours. With its 40 meter per side square plan and two levels above ground, the building occupies a site on the edge of the town, beside a playing field and open countryside. The school is composed of ten classrooms and two sections, for a total of 250 students.The north, east and west elevations, facing the inhabited centre, are compact with a very limited number of square openings of differing dimensions. Their regular pattern is upset by a graphic tool: they are animated by painted square or rectangular surfaces that, rotating like a pinwheel, are coloured orange, white or red to contrast with the uniform surface of the walls.

After winning a design competition for the reconstruction of a temporary school for an area devastated by the earthquakes that struck the region of Emilia on the 20 and 29 May 2012, the project by Mario Cucinella was already under construction by 24 August of the same year. Some 45 days later the structure was complete and shortly after mid-October everything was ready for the students of Mantovani Nursery school and the Gonelli primary school from the town of Mirabello (FE). The project site is a former parking lot. Realised entirely in prefabricated insulated concrete panels, the building boasts Class A energy certification. Similar attention was focused on the safety of the structure in the event of another sismic event. All of this was made possible by the design of pier elements that are loading bearing, insulating and used to divide and hierarchically structure the interior spaces.

In May 2012 the region of Emilia Romagna was struck by an earthquake that damaged a significant number of existing buildings and structures. At the beginning of July the Regional Government approved an extraordinary program to open its schools for the 2012-2013 school year. Funds were allocated for the construction of 28 new school buildings to substitute those seriously damaged and impossible to repair, known as EST – Edifici Scolastici Temporanei (Temporary School Buildings), and for the rental of prefabricated modules to be used as schools while awaiting the completion of sismic improvement works to those schools that could be recovered. This is the case of the Montessori nursery and kindergarten in San Felice sul Panaro, designed by the architects Paolo Didonè, Sergio de Gioia and Fabrizio Michielon, in 2012. A condition of urgency underlies the various considerations behind the project, which resulted in the design of a parti whose strengths are simplicity of construction, composition and layout.

With this project MADE attempt to draw younger generations closer to the healthier and more authentic realties of ecology and nature. The school becomes a transversal point of reference between generations, a space of encounter and exchange between students and adults that rotates around the new complex and agricultural campus that occupies more than half the available lot. The school is a living part of a small town but at the same time it is also open toward the countryside; only a portion of the didactic and educational activities occur inside the building. Equally valuable ludic and working experiences are linked with free time according to age, skill and the activities that adults and children propose. The playground area attracts the attention of passers-by. Bright colours and geometric fields mark the area of the recreational spaces, a filter open to the entire community and situated between public life and the school.

The desire not to consume more land, the decision to avoid invasive forms and the search for an original relationship with the monumental spaces of the historic city are the inputs that stimulated the creation of a non-form. The idea is one of excavation, a sort of contemporary archaeological space that reveals its complexity and does not shy away from a dialogue with its surroundings. The composition rotates around a generous open and vertical ‘heart’ that directly connects the building’s users with the principal elements of the surrounding area, beginning with the visual relationship with a historic convent. The large central void, covered by a glass roof, reveals and exposes the layers and functions that make up this subterranean building. Light and the void are the true protagonists of the school. Light is exalted and promoted in a host of ways from the lowest level of the building, both through the generosity of the central space and through the numerous cuts that define the design of the garden of the upper roof.

The school is laid out according to a clear parti, organised as a series of spaces that function like the system of streets and public squares in a city, distributing flows and activities in architectural environments that foster meetings, social interaction and ludic activities. For this reason, other than classrooms, services and offices, the school also features an outdoor theatre, a municipal gymnasium, a cafeteria and an auditorium, articulated and interrelated by a system of open spaces that establish a formal and functional relationship with the city. The school occupies the centre of its lot. The opposing entrances to the primary and high school constitute the fulcrum of the parti and mark the beginning and end of a long axis that structures the project and connects the didactic park with an urban park.

Situated in a fringe area between the town hall and the local cemetery, the school becomes a natural definition of a new urban border, consolidating the street front to the south and west with a pair of acute L-shaped volumes, wrapping a green court of thematic gardens protecting existing trees. The elevations of the school facing the street are substantially closed or screened, while those facing the courtyard are transparent and permeable. Their glazed surfaces offer all of the school’s main spaces a direct view of the garden and panorama of the surrounding hills. This “defensive” attitude, the reconstruction of an edge, is the central theme of the project. It is emphasised on the exterior by the use of exposed brick that roots the building to the site.

This new nursery school in Inzago is situated to the south of the city’s historic centre, in a primarily residential area close to other public spaces including a park and sports facility. The plan and layout of the lot highlight a particular attention toward issues of climate, orientation and the relationship between the building and the sun’s rays. The volume of classrooms is set along the east-west axis to maximize the exploitation of solar exposure throughout the year. The same volume is screened on the south side by a lightweight steel portico supporting a system of brise-soleils. Each of the fully glazed classrooms features its own external wood terrace, change rooms and toilets, creating ideal environments for a range of integrated functions.

The school is situated in a vast plain to the south of the city of Vipiteno, once an immense swamp. This element was very important to the design of the new school: to avoid lowering the water table just below the ground, the architects chose to sit the building on vibration compacted gravel piles supporting a podium raised 80 cm above ground. The new school is an elongated C-shaped volume wrapping around a central courtyard. Inside and outside the use of colour becomes a strategic spatial and functional tool: on the interior a sequence of walls and suspended volumes articulate the spaces of circulation, creating a scenography in which yellow and orange shift different planes away from and toward the building’s users; outside the large green lawn alludes to the ground and a natural world in continuous evolution.