The project trasforms the existing building, designed in the '60s, into an innovative school by radically rethinking the relationship between the school and the external -urban,social,natural- landscape and through a series of specific design actions that establishes a dialogical relationship with the actual building.
At the urban level, the reorganization of accesses and external areas opens the school spaces to the city.
The new main entrance transforms the back of the building into a new façade and draws a large, accessible, traffic-protected green space. This creates a clear division of the exterior with a gradient between the semi-public and the controlled spaces of the school, the courtyards.
The program is organized according to the new system of accesses, favoring a continuous and controlled use of the building that, following the concept of community schools, has been designed to integrate a large number of activities and services opened to the district community.
The external landscape have been designed taking into account many factors: they support all didactic activities, invite students to gather after school and are suitable for community uses beyond school hours.
On the architectural level, few demolitions regive formal indipendence to each volume, whose new façades establish specific physical and visual relationships with the outside spaces of the school and the context.
The topic of the new building envelope has been interpreted as an opportunity for innovating the entire school structure and as a tool for transmitting the pedagogical values of a community school.
According to the budget, a solution that creates new spaces (and therefore new educational opportunities) was preferred.
New structures extend the educational and recreational activities in terraces and outdoor gardens, welcome new learning spaces and carries safety elements and innovative engineering plant.
This model has the ambition to make this school work as a pilot project, as it can be replicated in schools built in the same historical moment and with similar technical-constructive features, allowing to innovate physical spaces no longer in line with new educational models.
The simplicity of the new building coating, finished with colored plaster, is elaborated by alternating finishes with different granulometry, creating slight façade depths.
The new design reinterprets the existing compositional element - the frame - and uses the color to create a new neighborhood landmark.
The interior of the school is a stimulating landscape, in which students develops their own autonomy and curiosity by responsibly choosing how to appropriate spaces.
The design of the cluster of classroom sums up design topics common to all the interior of the school: the interrelationship between interior / exterior, furniture as a transformative element, greenery as an element that accompanies the students in everyday life and assume pedagogical value.
The classrooms alternate with informal and complementary learning spaces; the common area is conceived as an internal / external system that finds its fulcrum in the central meeting space.
The classroom is the ideal hinge between the interior and exterior learning landscape and can be configured for frontal lessons and group activities. The new external structures provide clusters with small outdoor spaces / gardens, used for group lessons and recreation (in the case of the common space deck) and for complementary teaching activities in case of the classrooms.
