Reggio School
Spain CCC ES
Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation
2022
Type
School
Tags
participatory processes, building with nature, progressive pedagogies, Spain ccc
Visitability
Allowed
Description
The design of Reggio School is based on the idea that architectural environments can arouse in children a desire for exploration and inquiry. In this way the building is thought of as a complex ecosystem that makes it possible for students to direct their own education through a process of self-driven collective experimentation— following pedagogical ideas that Loris Malaguzzi and parents in the Italian city of Reggio nell’Emilia developed to empower children’s capacity to deal with unpredictable challenges and potentials.The design, construction and use of this building is intended to exceed the paradigm of sustainability to engage with ecology as an approach where environmental impact, more-than-human alliances, material mobilization, collective governance and pedagogies intersect through architecture.The stacking of diversity as an environment for self-education Avoiding homogenization and unified standards, the architecture of the school aims to become a multiverse where the layered complexity of the environment becomes readable and experiential. It operates as an assemblage of different climates, ecosystems, architectural traditions, and regulations. Its vertical progression begins with a ground floor engaged with the terrain, where classrooms for younger students are placed. Stacked on top of this, the higher levels are where students in intermediate classes coexist with reclaimed water and soil tanks that nourish an indoor garden reaching the uppermost levels under a greenhouse structure.Classrooms for older students are organized around this inner garden, as in a small village. This distribution of uses implies an ongoing maturity process that is translated into the growing capacity of students to explore the school ecosystem on their own and with their peers.A more-than-human assembly as the school’s heart The second floor, formalized as a large void opened through landscape-scale arches to the surrounding ecosystems, is conceived as the school’s main social plaza. Here the architecture encourages teachers and students to participate in school government and to interact with the surrounding landscapes and territories. This 5,000 square-feet central area is over 26-feet high and conceived of as a cosmopolitical agora; a semi-enclosed space crisscrossed by the air tempered by the holm oak trees from the neighboring countryside. A network of ecologists and edaphologists designed small gardens specifically made to host and nurture communities of insects, butterflies, birds and bats. Here, mundane activities like exercising coexist with discussions about how the school is run as a community and what is the way to relate to the neighboring streams and fields. Ultimately, this floor operates as a more-than-human summiting chamber where students and teachers can sense and attune to the ecosystems they are part of.(Description provided by the architects)