Schools

For over three decades, C+S Architects has imagined schools as the piazzas of small towns and villages: civic spaces, open beyond school hours, where education and community life meet. This vision, which helped rewrite the policies schools are designed in Italy, belongs to a broader idea the practice calls Future Heritage — an architecture where memory, ecology, and public life are held together and carried forward, with the school planted as a civic seed from which community can grow.

Location Analysis — The Dasha River Ecological Corridor flows along the western side of the site and empties into the sea, using water as a link to connect various educational and urban public facilities. Leveraging the improvement of the Dasha River, Pingshan School has become a significant spatial node at the northern end of the Dasha River.

School at Belgaon Dhaga begins by moving beyond the rigid functions of the original building, using the new addition to foster spontaneous activity and unscripted interaction. The intent is to create informal learning environments that offer freedom and encourage a better exchange of knowledge between everyone inhabiting the space. Through this approach, the extension becomes a tool to bridge the gap between formal use and informal discovery, turning the in between zones into meaningful places of engagement.

The new project for the reconstruction of the “Partizani” school provides us with the opportunity to create an identity space in which, through the proposed architectural intervention, we not only aim to restore a variety of educational environments in collaboration with the surrounding environment, but we also hope that this intervention will create a dialogue with both the architectural context and its experience. Located in a dense urban location, where the facility is surrounded by large buildings of up to 13 stories, our proposal entails collaborating with the surrounding neighborhood and integrating the school into the local community. It is critical that the spaces we build, both inside and outdoors, are the most dynamic locations where creativity and healthy relationships are constantly evolving. Given the lack of vegetation in the surrounding region, we believe that the connection with nature is a crucial aspect that not only ties the building to the environment but also influences the increase of greenery in the surrounding area.

A rural school rooted in a thousand years of history – Set within a landscape inhabited for thousands of years, Jonslund skola transforms local history into a contemporary architectural identity.

Immersed in the City – The Relocation and Expansion Project of Wuning Middle School in Putuo District, Shanghai — The relocation and expansion project of Wuning Middle School (now name as The Second High School Affiliated to Tongji University) is situated at 186 Dongxin Road, Putuo District. This site is located within the Inner Ring area of Shanghai, surrounded by densely populated residential neighborhoods. To the north, it borders directly on Light Rail Line 3 and the Inner Ring Highway. This location experiences heavy traffic volumes and features high building density. After arguments by the relevant urban planning authorities, it has been decided to relocate the school from the northwest to the southeast side of the site through a land swap strategy. This new strategy will provide efficient space for a modern secondary school with an expanded capacity of 40 classes.

Immersed in the City – The Relocation and Expansion Project of Wuning Middle School in Putuo District, Shanghai — The relocation and expansion project of Wuning Middle School (now name as The Second High School Affiliated to Tongji University) is situated at 186 Dongxin Road, Putuo District. This site is located within the Inner Ring area of Shanghai, surrounded by densely populated residential neighborhoods. To the north, it borders directly on Light Rail Line 3 and the Inner Ring Highway. This location experiences heavy traffic volumes and features high building density. After arguments by the relevant urban planning authorities, it has been decided to relocate the school from the northwest to the southeast side of the site through a land swap strategy. This new strategy will provide efficient space for a modern secondary school with an expanded capacity of 40 classes.

People are influenced by built space, so we planned Songsan Middle School to have a variety of building groups and yards so that children can grow up in a village-like landscape that changes just by moving a few steps. We all want to raise our children to be more open-minded and endeavoring. And to do so, the fundamental shape and structure of the school needs to change. School buildings should be broken down into smaller blocks, with small yards and outside spaces in various shapes and forms in between the blocks where they can play around. I think our kids’ school should feel more like a “Smurfs’ Village” than one large building, which is the standard layout of schools seen in Korea.