Schools: from the Domus Archive to the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial 2020

We have in common education all over the planet, not only because we are learning animals, but also because it is our society’s way of caring for young people. Even where there are no schools. This is how Domus responds to the theme of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial 2020. Not surprisingly, the theme was so topical after the Second World War that the magazine devoted an entire issue (220, June 1947) to a survey of school buildings. The pandemic brought us to a similar condition, for schools, to that of a war, in which we feel uncertain and vulnerable. Every government tries to defend the possibility for students to attend school. That is why we propose a selection of projects from the past, extracted from the Domus issues along with some recent ones. Parallels between past and present can be seen through the lens of the most advanced educational architecture of the past, derived from the pedagogy of the time, and the problems architects face today.

It was during the direction of Ernesto Nathan Rogers after the Second World War that the issue dedicated to schools came out, with examples ranging from rural schools to the most advanced in Europe and the United States, the horizon was this. The subject was taken up by Alessandro Benetti in 2018 who reread that issue in this article. Also in 1947 a short article on a Swedish girls’ school appeared in the magazine in which the issue of gender was glimpsed. The question is still under discussion: is gender equality really promoted in schools? And we are not just talking about overtly patriarchal, theocratic or dictatorial societies.

In the 60s the project of the University City of Urbino is what we have chosen, a concrete utopia that will define the form and function of a historical city in central Italy. A happy case of collaboration between an architect, Giancarlo De Carlo, and a public administration. Elsewhere, student protests will explode, the cultural climate, to which architects are not insensitive, has changed. As the cities and the population grow, more new schools have to be built in the suburbs, which have grown rapidly and are almost always lacking in quality.
The ‘70s saw architects try their hand at giving dignity to these areas, but as Benetti always says, it was “a season with excellent intentions but contradictory results”, especially in Italy. Nevertheless, there are decidedly advanced experiments combining design and pedagogy.
Since the 1990s a project by Carme Pinós and Enric Miralles, published in 1995, has emerged, whose broken lines are justified by work on the slope of the terrain.

In the new century many architects return to the theme of school for those who do not have it, this time in poorer, non-Western countries. The case of Diébédò Francis Kéré and the work done in Gando, his hometown in Burkina Faso, is extraordinary and exemplary. It contains all the elements of an authentic cultural exchange between his European culture, he graduated in Berlin, and the local culture he knows well. Sustainability includes all the fundamental elements: economic, environmental and social. His projects in Africa are also fundamentally anti-colonial, and are thus part of the current debate on African identity both on the continent and in former colonial countries. Among the other published project we have chosen two examples: a primary school in the Vietnamese jungle designed by studio 1+1>2 and a library in a mountain village in China. Finally, the amphibious school project by Saif Ul Haque Sthapati, Bangladesh, winner of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2019, published in Domus 1050, October 2020. (top image)

And then color, which in school buildings is reserved for children. Exploited from the puritanical greyness of modernism – see Michel Pastureau’s beautiful analysis of Black: The History of a Color, Princeton University Press, 2008 – it is a sort of “right” left to children. So the building of a nursery school in Bhul, Alsace, by Dominique Coulon et Associés is in shades of red, while Emmanuelle Moreau designs a kindergarten and nursery school in Japan with fluid interiors, using 18 colors. Here the aim is clearly to stimulate children’s growth through colour. Among the projects going against the trend is the vernacular, sustainable school in the small village of Sainte-Marie-Sicche in Corsica. Amelia Tavelle Architectes works here on the relationship with the surrounding nature. Finally a look at the furnishings. As time goes by the school’s furniture keeps changing, and it seems to go back and forth. Because of the coronavirus, last summer the Italian Ministry of Education bought 2.5 million individual desks for the reopening of schools. Staying close in this 2020 is not an option.