Reggio School

With a playful and irreverent image that could have been taken from the catalog of Bernard Rudofsky's Architecture Without Architects or even Accidentally Wes Anderson, the project is based on the idea that architecture can be the activator of children's instincts for exploration and inquiry. The building becomes a pedagogical tool as envisaged by the same philosophy of the Reggio Emilia school: children's creativity is enhanced by the possibility of experimenting with the "100 languages" with which every human being is endowed through play, art, music and cooking.

André Jaque declares that "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." The building is composed as a complex ecosystem in which traditional classroom spaces are integrated with spaces for other uses, such as gardens or reclaimed water and earth reservoirs — as if it were a small village with a spatial complexity stratified in height. The school presents simpler spaces for younger students on the first floor and more complex spaces on the upper floors for older students who have more abilities to explore the school ecosystem on their own and with their peers.

The second floor presents a large void of 450m2 and almost 8 meters high, expressed on the exterior with large-scale arches. It is the school's main social plaza, a semi-enclosed space conceived as a cosmopolitan agora integrating small gardens made specifically to house and nurture communities of insects, butterflies, birds and bats. Here, students, teachers and school staff can feel and tune in to the natural and social ecosystems of which they are a part.

The project embraces the theme of sustainability without resorting to high-tech construction or technology, but through a low-budget strategy that starts with the reduction of grey energy embedded in the building to limit its ecological footprint. Everything superfluous is eliminated. The structure is slimmed down. Unnecessary cladding, false ceilings or floating floors to hide installations disappear, considerably reducing the amount of material needed for construction and allowing for easy maintenance. A compact form, with a reduced surface/volume ratio, and an oversized external insulation made of sprayed cork make up a highly energy-efficient building that appears sincere and naked, leaving all its components on view; it allows students to read how it works so that they can question how their bodies and social interactions depend on the exchanges and circulations of water, energy and air. The irregular surface of the external cork insulation even favors the accumulation of organic matter, so that the building envelope will become over time the habitat of numerous forms of fungal, plant and animal microbiological life.