Andres Jacque / Office for Political Innovation has released their design for the Reggio School in Encinar de los Reyes, Madrid. Promoted by the Reggio Center for Pedagogical Research and Innovation, the project is based on the idea that architectural environments can evoke in children the desire for exploration and inquiry.
The building is imagined as a complex ecosystem that makes it possible for students to direct their own education through a process of self-driven collective experimentation. Avoiding homogenization and unified standards, the school’s architecture aims to become a multiverse where a layered environmental complexity is established. The scheme, therefore, operates as a collective of different climates, situations, and regulations.
The school’s vertical progression stacks a ground level, engaged with the terrain, where younger students are placed, and a second floor where students in intermediate levels coexist with water and soil tanks that nourish an indoor forest reaching the upper levels under a greenhouse structure. Classrooms for older students are organized around this inner forest, echoing a small village.
The second floor is imagined as a main gathering space for the school. More than 26-feet high, the empty space around the roots of the inner forest, the space offers 5000 square feet of cosmopolitical agora, where vegetation, water, and soil frame a changing program of gyms, art classrooms, conference and event halls, and assembly space.
The scheme is expected to be completed in the fall of 2020.
Team: Roberto González García, Luis González Cabrera, Alberto Heras, Paola Pardo-Castillo, Juan David Barreto, Inês Barros, Ludovica Battista, Elise Durand, Bansi Mehta, Jesús Meseguer Cortés, Alessandro Peja
Structural Engineering: QL Engineering
Services Engineering: JG Engineering
Quantity Survey: Dirtec
