Schools

In an arid landscape and an almost flat land of the municipality of San Juan de Urabá, this school was built replacing previous buildings in very poor condition. Around a wide area of games and the soccer field, modular buildings form a polygonal perimeter, with corridors to the interior, and silent facades to the outside.

Set in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, the village of Bosdarros extends along a main street, the primary school being the entry point. The project aims, firstly, to redefine the accessibility to the school that is limited by wild parking, cypresses and different entrances, and secondly to reform its usability. Two elements are thus created: a new refectory is set in tangent with the school and a staircase is appended to the back side of the old building, generating a new distribution of open-plan spaces.

Confrontation and adaptation
The Suzhou technology and science town adopts a highly efficient model where the land is subdivided into a grid of various natures with similar urban scales. Our proposal here takes advantage of the existing constraints and leverages the maximum value from the natural surroundings – Confronting both the tight city grid and the grand nature nearby, one side of the site is edged by the lush nature such as canals, wetlands and mountains. The opposite edge of the site is facing a highly artificial environment filled with high density apartment towers.

Ventilation and brightness: The ground floor, where the locker rooms are located, is a more opaque and intimate block. Direct sunlight which may be a source of glare is avoided in the table tennis room and in the gym room.
On the 2nd floor (as in the next floor level after Ground floor level), the façade is made of perforated sheet metal and has two usages. It provides passive protection from direct sunlight and ensures thermal comfort through natural ventilation. The almost constant temperature of the sports hall, the true “lung of the project”, makes air conditioning useless, even when the temperatures reach 35 ° outside.

The project is clearly conditioned from the beginning by the topography and morphology of the plot and arises from the transformation of those limits in its virtue. The topography descends sharply in two directions and the morphology of the plot that closes outwards and opens inwards, leaving a minimal front for the development of the façade. In addition to the strict design standards, some uses are required, such as the concierge, common spaces or the Parent-Student Association. The building needs to be attached to the only point of contact with the main road with the maximum possible area. That explains the morphology in “U” form. The building is implanted next to the only current access of the plot, developing the entire educational program in a compact volume at the top, leaving the rest of the land for outdoor spaces.

Following an invited design competition in 2013, we were commissioned to develop proposals for a visually and experientially inspiring building that would sit at the heart of the campus and serve as a hub for some of the key spaces of learning and day-to-day activities: a new library, multi-purpose auditorium, teaching spaces, cafe, shop, social space, offices and sixth form supporting spaces. Crucially, the centre was also envisaged as an environment which acts as a stepping-stone towards the experiences of Higher Education.

The Roskilde Festival Folk High School is closely linked to the world-famous Roskilde Music Festival, which every year temporarily turns this small town on the outskirts of Copenhagen into the fourth- largest city in Denmark. The school is an example of the Danish system of folk high schools, which deliver a “non-formal adult education” following the concept of “lifelong learning”. This system is based on the ideas of 19th-century Danish intellectual N.F.S. Grundtvig, who believed schools should educate their students to be active participants in society. Courses at Roskilde Festival High School last between 4–10 months, with students and teachers living together at the school to achieve total immersion in their education. The Roskilde Festival High School is the first purpose-built school of this type in Denmark in 50 years and aims to further the values of the Roskilde Festival through courses in music, media, leadership, politics, art, architecture, and design.

Settled into the valley slope above the small village of Lavale, Avasara Academy is a residential school for economically disadvantaged young women in western India.