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“We constructed the partitions of this faculty collectively, women and men, as a result of we needed it to be new and totally different for our kids.”
—the folks of Villa Cella, Reggio Emilia, Might 1945
After weaving by means of the streets of Madrid’s El Encinar de los Reyes neighborhood, learners arrive on the Highlands Colegio, a non-public Catholic academy in a nondescript orthogonal brick constructing. College students are referred to as over a loudspeaker and run to class of their blue uniforms: fits for the boys and skirts for the ladies. Simply past the varsity, nevertheless, is one thing fully totally different: A yellow, spaceship-like tower with a wide range of home windows, arches, sawtooth roofs, and concrete platforms rises within the distance. That constructing is the Reggio College, designed by the Workplace for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN), a apply led by Andrés Jaque, with places of work in Madrid and New York.
This distinction couldn’t be any clearer. The architectural distinction highlights Reggio’s place within the lengthy historical past of progressive faculty design and the hunt to offer higher studying environments by means of structure.
Madrid’s Reggio College program relies on the Reggio Emilia philosophy, a nonhierarchical, cooperative studying model born in 1945 within the wake of the destruction of Italy throughout World Warfare II. Within the area of Emilia-Romagna, the unconventional leftist Italian Girls’s Union constructed its personal cooperative colleges in bombed-out buildings. The Reggio Emilia pedagogy—a contemporary begin after Fascism destroyed the training system—eschews hierarchical info switch in favor of self-development, communication, and encounters.
As a part of this philosophy, the varsity surroundings is taken into account the “third instructor,” along with human instructors and different kids. Like its modernist predecessors, the structure of the Reggio College is supposed to provide kids a greater studying surroundings to “arouse in kids a need for exploration and inquiry,” in keeping with a undertaking description by OFFPOLINN.
The Reggio College in Madrid seeks to foster this interplay by means of its close to elimination of hallways, a transfer that leads to college students of all ages wandering by means of totally different lecture rooms or coming into rooms immediately from communal areas such because the cafeteria. The scheme follows within the lineage of early modernist and Functionalist plans that had been much less formally inflexible and extra functionally expressive than the strict plans of their Beaux Arts predecessors. Each Wright’s Hillside Residence College II at Taliesin (1901) and Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer’s German Commerce Union College (1930) are examples of this impulse, as they reorganized the varsity with fastidiously designed preparations of lecture rooms, connections to nature, and specialised frequent areas corresponding to cafes, gymnasiums, and auditoriums.
This modernist concept of liberating colleges (in plan) from institutional rigidity would proceed by means of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies with later progressive actions corresponding to Hertzberger’s eclectic, versatile designs for the Montessori system of interactive, self-directed studying, or the open-school idea, which tried to nearly fully eradicate partitions to foster communication and interplay amongst college students of all ranges. Open-concept faculty buildings are exemplified by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer’s Mt. Wholesome Elementary College (1972) in Columbus, Indiana, which to at the present time has retained its open classroom clusters with many of the unique structure intact.
At Reggio, the query “Is having one other class of scholars strolling by means of a science lab a good suggestion?” is a crucial a part of an ongoing experiment by which the plan acts as a social organizer throughout the pedagogical ambitions of a given faculty.
In part, the Reggio’s programmatic reorganization is heightened within the central atrium house, “a more-than-human meeting on the faculty’s coronary heart,” Jaque advised AN on a go to to the varsity in January. Right here the architects make use of a vertical group system they describe as “the stacking of range as an surroundings for self-education.” Youthful college students are positioned on the bottom ground, with older college students on flooring above, a technique that remembers the Indian Group College (2007) in Milwaukee by Antoine Predock with collaborating designer Chris Cornelius. At Reggio, water and soil tanks are positioned alongside circulation paths, and an indoor backyard acts as a gathering house in addition to a pure ecosystem throughout the constructing—a nonhuman classmate.
Fostering a connection to nature by way of out of doors courtyards, walkways, and play areas has lengthy been a theme in fashionable faculty design, particularly within the work of California architects like Richard Neutra and John Carl Warnecke. Madrid’s Reggio faculty brings the surface in to create a triple-height indoor panorama that acts as a central group house; it’s a mixture courtyard-atrium, and, notably, each had been frequent parts in modernist faculty design.
It’s not all enjoyable and video games. One of many greatest challenges at school design is price. Reggio was constructed cheaply at an total price of about $9 million. Whereas the common value per sq. foot for colleges in Spain is about $162 per sq. foot, Reggio landed at about $120 per sq. foot. Within the twenty first century, environmental challenges can additional complicate faculty budgets, however Jaque and OFFPOLINN took it as a chance for intelligent experimentation. At Reggio, they name their technique “thinning, skinning, and make fluffy.”
Utilizing much less materials (“thinning”) meant decreasing the quantity of concrete by means of shut collaboration with the structural engineer, eliminating 33 % of the embodied vitality within the construction. Taking off beauty supplies (“skinning”) corresponding to wallcoverings, drop ceilings, and raised flooring, OFFPOLINN created a brand new aesthetic of “nakedness,” exposing techniques as a lot as doable. On the outside, a particular cork insulation developed by OFFPOLINN was sprayed on (“make fluffy”). It provides the constructing its distinctive coloring, in addition to double the R-value required by native code, and saves cash each pre- and postoccupancy. And the tough floor of the cork insulation is predicted to develop its personal ecosystem with fungi, vegetation, and animals. Intelligent use—or nonuse—of supplies has lengthy been a tenet of modernist faculty design, usually to thrilling ends. The Architects Collaborative, led by Walter Gropius and Norman Fletcher, designed its “Common College” in 1954 as a thought experiment for Collier’s journal. Composed of any variety of sq. pavilions fabricated from prefabricated supplies, the modular system could possibly be economically constructed and endlessly custom-made. The colourful steel tubes at John Johansen’s Smith Elementary College (1969) in Columbus are fabricated from painted steel farm sheds. Equally, at Reggio, the constructing’s aesthetic—each the “bare” inside and the “fluffy” exterior—comes from options required by financial system. OFFPOLINN additionally employed a number of low cost supplies that aren’t “modern,” but give the varsity its distinctive aesthetics. Glass blocks, stone sinks from artisans in a close-by village, and round home windows utilized in camper van conversions are all off-the-beaten-path supplies that break from the on a regular basis faculty constructing palette.
The design choices are a part of a holistic technique: Expose and specific techniques to provide college students consciousness of these techniques and their relationships to them. This consists of studying about mechanical and structural techniques, but in addition ecological techniques and even social and political techniques. The school rooms’ adjacencies to nature and customary areas are extra intertwined than in a typical faculty, forcing college students to participate within the “public” features of the varsity’s group and educating them lifelong abilities about societal participation.
Jaque’s conceptualization of the varsity constructing as “bare” resonates with the over-articulation of program in what critic R. Thomas Hille referred to as the “associational” colleges of German architect Hans Scharoun, who developed a number of designs for colleges that may simulate a democratic society by grouping lecture rooms in ranges, or neighborhoods, alongside a public “avenue” hall. For Jaque, nevertheless, this over-articulation shouldn’t be solely programmatic but in addition used to show constructing techniques and combine nature in an nearly mannerist manner. The top purpose is similar: to foster a way of connection between college students and the surface world, each pure and social.
This concept of faculty as a mannequin society isn’t totally shaped in its website plan and relationship to the neighborhood. The connection to the adjoining linear park shouldn’t be but clear, because the park is presently being deliberate by OFFPOLINN’s group, and the varsity’s landscaping shouldn’t be totally grown. A big concrete slab will probably be augmented with some extra hospitable plantings, furnishings, or paint that can invite the group in. OFFPOLINN’s hypnotic, nearly dizzying rhetoric may appear needlessly educational, nevertheless it finally checks out when touring the work it generates. In reality, the concepts develop into a part of the constructing’s lore, including a layer of inspiration and enchantment to the varsity itself.
In 2023, it’s uncommon to see a constructing that really innovates in program, materials, or ecological technique, not to mention all three. The Madrid Reggio College does this in a manner that aligns with one of the best intentions and examples of modernism. Colleges are sometimes the primary place that impressionable college students encounter structure, and these environments might be formative when embracing a lifetime of studying, exploration, and self-education. If that’s the position of a college constructing, then the Reggio College in Madrid stands to play it superbly.
Matt Shaw is a New York–based mostly columnist and writer of the forthcoming guide American Trendy: Structure Group Columbus Indiana.
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