Schools

The school is located near the center of Taipas village, in an already consolidated urban area and it was built from another existing school that was completely demolished. In that sense, the proposed intervention aimed not only at replacing the old school facilities, built on a totally dysfunctional scheme, which for a long time had ceased to meet the minimum conditions for teaching and learning, but also proposing the requalification and planning of all the space within the boundaries of the terrain, with the design of its exterior spaces, new playing fields, garden areas or even new areas for students’ recreation, establishing new relationships with their surroundings.

The rural market town Bütze-Wolfurt in the Bregenz district of Vorarlberg wanted to enlarge their primary school and integrate the neighboring kindergarten and daycare center. The decision was made to completely refurbish the old three-story building from the 1960s and demolish the part from the 1990s due to structural reasons. The gymnasium in the basement was preserved and built over with two new floors. The new 60-meter-long and 27-meter-high timber-frame volume with a smooth wood-clad façade and a plastered plinth – details which were also taken over on the existing building – now forms a harmonious extension of the school complex. The new structure with a pergola at each end integrates calmly into the scenic beauty of lush fields and trees and the rural character of the town.

Idea. We were faced with a difficult but interesting task from the head creators of the TUMO school – to create an architectural design of a building based on an iPhone. Minimalistic, technological, and recognizable. Modern product design, mostly dictated by the development of technology, ergonomics, and marketing is hardly imaginable in fundamental art and large shapes, but we tried the best to transform the principle and approach of design into architecture.

One of the most recent actions of the Burkina Faso Ministry of Education in the fight against school dropouts has been to unify isolated schools into school complexes where education is provided from nursery to high school. The project includes the development of the new Bangre Veenem School Complex from the existing Primary school in the village of Youlou (Koudougou), as well as the construction of the Secondary school and auxiliary buildings (canteen, staff changing rooms, water tank and other service areas). In the future, the NGO and the city council will have to complete the intervention with the construction of the Nursery and the central Administration of the complex.

Casa Fundamental is a kindergarten and elementary school. It was conceived to be a space for “teaching and learning, essentially for socializing, educational debate, academic rigor, pedagogical experimentation, more careful and kind relationships”, as the founders-educators put it. The school’s architectural project was developed simultaneously with the search for innovative educational proposals that consider space as an active element of the teaching and learning process, such as Loris Malaguzzi and the Reggio Emilia network, Herman Hertzberger and Montessori schools, AltSchool and researcher Doris Kowaltowski.

In the harbour area, a narrow stretch of land along a dock is freed from port activities. A very simple ‘chopstick’ urban plan is developed by O.M.A. in which green open pockets alternate with dense construction. In order to offer a notion of centrality to the linear plan, a public path is meant to cross the whole strip.

The building of the kindergarten interweaves in the morphology of the street. The building tries to fit in with the existing row houses. The facade bends with the curvature of the street and connects to the adjacent building on both sides.

Yoglar is a new school for early music and piano education located in a 1950s’ residential area in Burgos (Spain), where our client wanted to create “a home for the music”. Our aim was to design a place both unique and functional, which could foster children’s creativity while achieving clear results in their music development from 0 to 12 years. The site, an old garage located in the ground floor of an old housing block, owes its singular shape to 2 projects from the beginning of the 1950s.