Schools

The extension to the vocational school ties in with the terraced existing building from the early 1980s in terms of urban planning and complements it with a distinctive building front at the southern end. The previous cul-de-sac situation has been converted into a ring road.

The school is located in the native community of Sonomoro, territory of the Nomatsigenga ethnic group in the central jungle of Peru and arises as part of a community process to provide early education for more than 70 boys and girls. The school is situated in a central location within the community and integrates into the daily dynamics of the territory, seeking to value local ways of inhabiting and learning through spatial experience.

The Pechbonnieu school complex was originally intended to be the rehabilitation and extension of an existing schooling facility. However, an in-depth analysis of the social cost of carbon, conducted during the competition phase, led the project team to propose an entirely new construction while remaining within budget. The existing school building lacked the capacity for sustainable transformation; its demolition would free up land and allow for a reimagined urban future. The creation of the school on the site enables broader development scenarios for the town, while the unification of primary and nursery levels offers the opportunity for children to grow and learn together from an early age.

The Center for Language and Movement serves as a cultural landmark and distinctive address on the Efeuweg campus promenade, a school campus in Berlin’s Neukölln district. It mediates between the large-scale public buildings of Gropiusstadt and the small-scale residential development of the surrounding area. The design is based on a variation of the gable form and develops a sculptural, narrative roof landscape – a place of language and movement interpreted spatially.

A preserved space near a residential neighborhood, its contours shaped over the years by the passage of water that gradually carved out these sunken lanes. To access the site, one crosses the wooded edge and discovers the meadow: a protected landscape with trees as its horizon. All the classrooms benefit from an unobstructed view of the generous playgrounds, with this wooded edge as a backdrop. It is this clearing, this inner landscape, conducive to the establishment of a school, that we wanted to capture: a world apart, both a protected space and a place of learning, experimentation, and discovery.

Located in Remoulins, near the Pont du Gard, Voltaire Middle School proposes a contextual and frugal architecture in which environmental, hydraulic, and educational constraints become the driving forces of the project rather than obstacles to overcome.

Building the places where our children are educated is a demanding task. Too often, these spaces suffer from obsolescence, both functional and symbolic. School architecture in France is strongly marked by two major eras: the nineteenth century with the Jules Ferry school model, and the post war period with the Pailleron model. While new schools continue to be built, many existing ones are renovated, extended, or transformed from these earlier models in order to meet contemporary educational and environmental expectations.

The new extension to the De Nova secondary school illustrates how architecture can embody innovative approaches to learning. The existing educational campus—comprising a kindergarten, primary school, and secondary school, alongside facilities for music and arts education—had evolved over decades. What began as a cluster of pavilions from the 1950s and 1960s, with further additions in the 1970s and 1980s, had become a fragmented ensemble lacking overall cohesion.

The Simone Veil School Group in Vertou is a new educational facility bringing together two schools within a single, unified structure: an eight-class kindergarten at ground level and a twelve-class elementary school above. The project emerges from a strong dialogue with the site and from a clear ambition to create a reassuring, generous learning environment.