The Seona Reid Building is in complementary contrast to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s 1909 Glasgow School of Art – forging a symbiotic relation in which each structure heightens the integral qualities of the other. A thin translucent materiality in considered contrast to the masonry of the Mackintosh building – volumes of light which express the school’s activity in the urban fabric embodying a forward-looking life for the arts.
located on the south side of sin le noble in france, the project was the first step of the implementation of an urban planning strategy that aims to include ‘le raquetʼ and ‘les episʼ into the city, increase their quality of life, and be environmentally friendly. the school links ‘les episʼ district to the newly created ‘le raquetʼ, sewing them to each other. the concept of the educational building follows the environmental and social principles developed in the urban project.
Energy optimisation and a natural match with the surroundings are among the key benefits of a new school building in Copenhagen, Denmark. The school, Skolen i Sydhavnen, is designed by JJW Architects, and is built according to the Danish low-energy class 2015. The artist, Peter Holst Henkel, has made the artistic decoration and the façade has become like a canvas, beautifully reflecting the interaction between art and architecture.
Located in a recently densely built up area that is home to a wide variety of constructions, the main challenge of this project was to create a center for this heterogeneous environment.
The shape of the lot posed another challenge (250m long and 50m wide on average), bordered lengthwise by railways, a source of noise and magnetic waves.
Construction works have begun on the Bora Residential Tower in Mexico City. Commissioned in 2015 by Nemesis Capital, a Mexican company committed to building new communities of the highest standards, the tower is within Santa Fe, an important business district in the west of Mexico City with a rapidly growing community that includes 3 universities and the regional offices of Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Roche and Amazon.
The opening of the new children’s playground at Ashburnham Community School in West London was met with shrieks of delight, as the children got a first taste of the recently transformed school grounds. The project was initiated and funded by The Bryan Adams Foundation, that has been supporting the school since 2014, and designed by Foster + Partners, working closely with playground designers Made From Scratch. The refurbishment is a key part of the school’s strategy to create a holistic learning environment for its pupils. It replaces asphalt play areas with a dynamic mix of hard and soft surfaces, natural vegetation, and specially designed play structures for the school children, while also incorporating state-of-the-art sports courts.
Two new classrooms have been designed by Dear Design as a multipurpose open space and leave behind the traditional rows of chairs and desks, and speaker’s platform to give life to a new distribution with modular dynamic furniture and greater commitment to technology, lighting and sound.
The new design of the space does not correspond to a simple aesthetic desire or example of modernity, but has been conceived and designed specifically to meet the ways of contact and learning that the new teaching mode of the School of Management of the UPF required.
To accommodate the merger of two primary schools the city of Knokke-Heist has developed an ambitious project: a so-called Passiefschool. The building has to comply with the highest environmental standards which should lead to a maximal consumption of 15 kWh per square meter for heating and cooling. A number of measures have been taken, some technical and some architectonic, to reach this goal. So besides triple glass, heavy duty insulation and the ‘Canadian Well’ for instance, the building features a ‘Volcano’ for night ventilation and a multifunctional porch to block the direct rays of the sun.
Team: Guus Peters, Gertjan Machiels, Gerbrand van Oostveen, Giulia Pastore, Michael Schoner and Gen Yamamoto with Shuichiro Mitomo, Justine Lemesre, Jasper Selen, Christian Asbø, Mindaugas Glodenis, Else Ferf Jentink, Luca Kaptein Roodnat (cover drawing)
Tarawera High School is situated between River Road and the Tarawera River in the small mill town of Kawerau.
The design reflects Kawerau’s unique culture, history and landscape. The masterplan proposes a solution that inspires learning & pro-motes the fulfilment of potential in Kawerau’s rangatahi (younger generation / youth).
Once across the threshold of this school complex near Paris delivered by the architect Vincent Parreira, the child enters a non-standard world, one that evokes the troglodyte houses, vernacular architecture… or a pupil’s escape.
In the 21st century metropolises, as urbanization has continued to expand, there are still some areas that have remained virgin territory. The site chosen for building the school was such a case. At the time of the competition, it was an empty lot bordered by vast farming concerns, the famous caricature that seemed a thing of the past, the “beet fields” that saw new towns and housing projects popping up during the post war boom decades. In a context with vague outlines, the building takes up its position, organized to form a little miniature town, a school hamlet. It extends along a narrow little pedestrian street, forming a continuous built front, but fragmented into several volumes and providing access to the various parts of the program: primary school, leisure center, and caretaker’s lodge.