For architects, schools are often complex structures to design. They must provide a variety of spaces for education, and also consider sports and recreational activities. But beyond its size or surface, the greatest challenge is to design an area that fosters a positive pedagogical environment for children. Below, a selection of +70 school projects with their drawings to inspire your proposals for learning campuses.
Ennead Architects has been enlisted to redefine the campus of The American School in Japan (ASIJ) to align the international school’s academic mission with its environment. Currently defined by its aging and fragmented infrastructure, the campus is set to become a dynamic and innovative space, encouraging integrated learning, cohesion, and collaboration across age groups. Sustainability principles, along with the experience of Japanese heritage, also play an important role in the design of the master plan, which proposes a toolkit of solutions intended to help create a unified, sustainable and resilient campus.
As part of the Circlewood consortium, OMA’s David Gianotten and Michel den Otter have developed a modular system to build schools that can adapt and transform throughout their lifecycle. The system was selected by the City of Amsterdam to be employed to build multiple schools in the coming ten years, as part of the Innovation Partnership School Buildings program. The citywide initiative aims to build nine to thirty “high-quality, flexible, and sustainable” schools as a way to contribute to the city’s goal of becoming fully circular by 2050.
The year 2022 was marked by several socio-cultural and economic crises across the globe, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the increasing cost of living worldwide, combined with a number of natural disasters such as the devastating floods in Pakistan and hurricane Ian in the US. In these difficult times, architects are stepping up and embracing their role in developing design-based solutions to humanitarian crises, ranging from temporary shelters and affordable housing schemes to centers for protecting at-risk groups such as homeless underage girls, children from low-income environments, or families in need of medical care.
This week's curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights projects submitted by the ArchDaily community that engage with their local communities, offering safe spaces for disadvantaged and at-risk groups. From a sanctuary for homeless girls in Iraq to an affordable housing project in Prague’s first skyscraper, this selection features projects centered around people, their needs, and desires. Many of the projects employ local materials such as clay bricks to lower the construction costs. They also reuse existing buildings and hope to engage the local community in building and appropriating the proposed spaces.
Designed by Atkins, a new zero-carbon secondary school in West Sussex has received planning permission from the West Sussex County Council. The school will be created at Homes England’s new Brookleigh development near Burgess Hill and will offer educational facilities to 900 local children. The building is designed to generate its own renewable energy on-site, eliminating the need for any fossil fuels. It also aims to achieve Passivhaus certification, the highest standard od energy efficiency a building can reach.
LINK Arkitektur has revealed the design of a school that integrates the local climate conditions and challenges within the educational process. Located in Torslanda near Gothenburg, Sweden, where it rains every other day during the school year, the project uses water as a resource for both play and learning, taking a disruptive situation and turning it into an opportunity for understanding nature and the state of the environment.
Located in Denmark’s Lolland-Falster region, Henning Larsen's New School in Sundby marked the commencement of a historic project for the country's sustainable educational-facility architecture. The primary school is set to be the largest construction project in Guldborgsund Municipality that ensures high sustainability parameters and community engagement. The school is expected to open its doors at the end of summer 2022, welcoming over 580 students in a nature-oriented premises.
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Architects are mobilizing their efforts, to help schools around the world reconsider their design in order to guarantee sustainability, emotional wellness, and physical health. CetraRuddy, Cooper Robertson, and WXY are amongst those proposing an increase in outdoor programming and a rearrangement of classrooms, for post-pandemic school design.
The architectural scene has been witnessing lately a growing focus on indoor/outdoor functions. Discover 3 different interventions from 3 different practices, tackling one common issue, and focusing on outdoor space as a major programming element.
Interdisciplinary architecture and urban design firm, Crossboundaries was founded in 2005 in Beijing by Binke Lenhardt (b. 1971, Mannheim, Germany) and Hao Dong (b. 1973, Shanxi province, China). The two met in New York in 1999, while pursuing Master of Architecture degrees at Pratt Institute. Dong had earned his bachelor’s from the Beijing Institute of Civil Engineering and Architecture and Lenhardt had received a Diploma in Architecture from the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, Germany. Prior to coming to the US, Lenhardt worked in Holland and Germany where she is a registered architect. After graduating from Pratt in 2000, the two architects worked at various firms in New York before moving to Beijing in 2002, at the time when the city was already preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics. They started working at the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design (BIAD) after Lenhardt studied Chinese at a local university and became proficient in Mandarin. The architects worked their way up at BIAD.
In her Sesc Pompéia theater, architect Lina Bo Bardi designed a central stage revealing the structure and all the functions of the theater's program, and renouncing traditional theater seating. Her seats were not upholstered, were close to each other, and encouraged a more aware, attentive, and upright posture among the audience, thus honoring, according to her, the ancient art of theater.
In the same way that the characteristics of architectural spaces alter our mood, feelings, concentration, and learning, so does the integral design element of furniture, which must be taken seriously when considering comprehensive user experiences. Regarding schools and learning environments in particular, the same attention given to teaching materials is often not conferred on furniture and physical structure.
As an aftermath of natural disasters, viruses and wars, in society, we often require emergency architecture. In this round-up, we explore how emergency architecture can accommodate educational needs and how it can bring together a community that has suffered social and economic hardship.
Emergency architecture can occur under a variety of circumstances and through the recent COVID-19 pandemic we have started to get a glimpse of the urgency for certain types of architecture across the world. What we sometimes take for granted in regards to socialising — a sense of community and access to quality education — some countries go without for large periods of time due to natural disasters, viruses and war.
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The Kurdish city of Kamyaran - which sits on the transit borders of Kurdistan and Iran - is a developing city that experienced a devastating earthquake a few years ago. The city is located in a district deprived of modern facilities, and the majority of the residents' income is acquired from the transit of products across the common border with Iraq and Turkey. Project developers in the area are faced with several challenges, one of which is the amount of projects needed to ameliorate the city's status.
Instead of designing two different projects on two separate sites, CAAT Studio proposed the Kamyaran City-School, a new concept which merges an elementary school and public space into one large facility that aims to improve the social and cultural life of its residents.
The Universidad de Lima, the most influential institution in Peru, is expanding its campus, in the heart of the capital, to offer a new learning experience, a never seen before novelty amongst the schools in Latin America.
The project’s main purpose is to create the whole college town, usually found abroad, in its central location in Lima. This innovative approach comes from the understanding of the importance of the concept of “university-cities” as a key economic driver. In fact, the master plan suggests making the campus as inclusive as possible, by putting in place all the facilities needed for students to actually linger.
“When we started out, our goal was to change the world, to do something that would really make a difference to the lives of people,” said Chad Hamilton, AIA LEED AP BD+C, Principal Architect of Hamilton + Aitken Architects (H+AA). “And education is one of the things that really determines how people live the rest of their lives. “So, for us it’s just a wonderful feeling, to improve kids’ educational spaces.”
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