Schools

Viennese call the districts north of the Danube “Transdanubia.” What sounds like a world far removed from contemporary urbanity is in fact a budding neighbourhood with bustling construction activity. Our primary and secondary school on Leopold-Kohr-Straße in Kagran, situated between a business park, recent housing estates, and the Ostbahn railway, sets a new anchor point in the district’s urban development. With its lively forecourt and play and sports areas, which can also be used by local residents, the school adds a new quality to the neighborhood. Spacious, covered terraces transform the façade into a vertical garden and articulate important spaces for learning and leisure, which can be used all year round.

Located very close to poplar woods and a river in Buttrio (Udine), the middle school hosts grades 11-13 and includes a sports hall. The school is the last development of an educational masterplan composed of 3 buildings: a nursery + kindergarten and a primary school.

The project is a public school consisting of a nursery, elementary, and intermediate sections, planned for a total of 360 students. The school was funded by the Municipality of the village of Abey from compensation paid by the government for a waste landfill created on municipal land in the 1990s and finally closed in 2015 after many local protests.

The school campus ‘VZW Vrije en Techniche Scholen Sint-Niklaas and VTS3 BUSO’ is characterized by a variety of typologies and styles. Besides a far-reaching vision for the redesign of the open space into pleasant green recreational areas, there was also a need for an additional building with classrooms and practice rooms.

Our commission began with a strategic assessment of Clifton Hill Primary School. The resulting Master Plan identified the opportunity to create a new learning and teaching campus to accommodate projected enrolment growth. Located on a corner site opposite the Darling Gardens, the highly visible new building would enable the much-loved inner-city school to meet increased student numbers and enrich its teaching and learning offering. Following close engagement with VSBA and school leadership, a brief emerged to create a dynamic vertical campus for grade 5 and 6 students.

Futian High School Campus is a ground-breaking model of boarding school in the heart of Shenzhen, the most modern and dynamic Chinese metropolis. Its unicity comes from multiple factors: a context of extreme urban conditions, a very high density, and a program layout that allows most facilities to be shared with the neighbors, together make Futian Campus a prototype of “a new city within the city”.

The Municipality of Bütschwil-Ganterschwil lies in the heart of Switzerland’s Toggenburg region. Once known for its textile industry, today its rural villages, close to Wil and St. Gallen, attract a constant stream of new residents, the youngest of whom require an increasing amount of school space. To meet this demand, an extension to Bütschwil Primary School was completed in 2021.

With the rapid development of Shenzhen, the urban population increased rapidly. It was up to 17.56 million in 2021. At the same time, there is a huge gap of places. The gap of places in Grade 1 of elementary schools in the whole city was 49,500 and that in the first year of junior high school was 10,600 in 2020. The highly intensive urban construction land has also led to a lack of land for the construction of elementary and secondary schools. There is a sharp contradiction between the gap of places and the lack of land for the construction of schools.