School buildings towards a new extraordinary

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Keywords

School building; COVID-19; Cooperative learning; Resilience; Wellbeing

Introduction

The lockdown caused by the COVID-19 emergency and the shortcomings of online teaching have emphasised why the school is a physical realm of learning spaces influencing cognitive, emotional and affective relationships that cannot be surrogated by distance learning technologies. Besides, the subsequent need of physical distancing has highlighted the lack of resilience of Italian school buildings. Given that Health is not only safety but also wellbeing, the quality of spaces is crucial for learning, wellbeing and inspiring behaviours. Yet, the pre-pandemic ‘ordinary’ of school buildings and debate in Italy was marked by endemic inadequacies and clichés respectively, which are discussed by the research in relation to their poor resilience to physical distancing and on the base of the fieldwork conducted for Milan Municipality. Considering the new requirements of health measures as a potential accelerating factor, this research delineate new principles of spatial setting and adaptive strategies for school buildings’ resilience to meet the new requirements while overcoming the endemic need of innovation and requalification of Italian schools, moving towards a ‘new extraordinary’.

The research proposes that in the ‘new extraodinary’ school buildings, people flows should be separated through architectural means, by reinventing communal spaces. In association with informal learning spaces and workspaces, classrooms can form a continuous fabric that has the complexity of a small city and landscape, being characterised by different depths of field and heights; degrees of partition and sharing; rooms, habitable recesses, squares or multifunctional theatres; shaded patios, ramps, paths and gardens. Learners could then experience architectural space in its full richness of space-places, meanings and symbols, metaphors and metonymies attributed to forms; in the play of different scales, heights and layouts, which predispose and stimulate different kinds of behaviour; and in the expression of tactile and aesthetic-perceptive values.

From the urban perspective, this research advocates that the schools of today should constitute again the beating heart of districts while providing a number of community functions and becoming hubs for lifelong learning connected with urban resources fifteen minutes walking. The school as a community centre, nonetheless, is a subject already emphasized by the Italian experience related to typological criticism, namely in the projects by Aymonino at Pesaro and Canella in the Milanese hinterland.

Shared outdoor spaces are also emphasised in this research. The pandemic has brought out the importance of outdoor spaces, which have been forgotten by contemporary pedagogy. Open-air education, instead, has a rich architectural tradition in the ‘open-air schools’ of the 1920s-30s and even before in Milan’s Rinnovata Pizzigoni (1911). They feature several issues that the pandemic calls for reconsideration: outdoor classrooms, equipped open air spaces, foldable and openable facades, and an active use of flat roofs. The author’s design for multifunctional open-air classrooms (2014) could be seen as an early prototype to extend safe and versatile teaching spaces into the districts’ parks.

My role

Qian Liu studied the classroom layout under social distancing rules, conducted investigation and statistics of school buildings in Milan, contributed to the final drawings and presentation.

Qian Liu also significantly contributed to the research-led design projects that encompassed the insights from this research project.

Research-led design projects:
- Redevelopment of Vimercate All-inclusive School Centre ( )
- Refurbishment of ‘Ruffini’ Primary School ( )

Helen Khanamiryan |

School buildings towards a new extraordinary

Keywords

Introduction

My role

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