Hasta La Ideas

To the comic book geek, few issues of their favorite superhero’s stories will be more prized than the one containing their Origin Story, which illustrates the atypical circumstances leading to that character’s superhero birth. Similarly we enjoy hearing that Apple was started in a garage, or that Dieter Rams applied for a job at Braun on a dare, or that Lincoln Logs were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Design schools have origin stories too, and one many of us may not be familiar with is that of the Rhode Island School of Design as documented by Dawn Barrett, their outgoing Architecture & Design Dean. Barrett is currently in the design world news for being the new President of the Massachusetts College of Art in Design, and she’s also noted for her work on Infinite Radius: Founding Rhode Island School of Design an anthology of essays and archival materials concerning RISD’s birth in the late 19th Century.

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This Kindergarten in northern Italy by Austrian architects Feld72 is split into three separate house-shaped blocks connected by glazing.

The sloping site of Kindergarten Terenten allows for a lower ground floor that opens onto a playground, shared with the school opposite.

One section of glazing between the structures encloses a foyer for the kindergarten, which acts as a both a children’s cloakroom and activity space.

Drawers and green foam blocks slide out from the sides of staircases.

All classrooms are located along the south elevation and multipurpose areas can be found on the north and west faces.

On the first floor a series of bridges interlink first floor rooms in the different buildings.

Photography is by Hertha Hurnaus.

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The following information has been provided by the architects:

Child daycare centre at Terenten – three building unit

Urbanistic context – integration in the built environment

The child daycare centre has been designed as a unique and individual building which nevertheless merges smoothly with the surrounding built environment. From an urbanistic perspective, the design concept is intended to give meaning and identity to this defined space – something special amid an everyday environment – without generating jarringly harsh contrasts. The new child daycare centre is located in an area with public facilities (education, sports).

Built on what used to be a miniature golf course, it forms an extension of Terenten’s built-up pedestrian zone. The centre will combine with the municipal offices, the sports hall and the neighbouring primary school to create an organic ensemble.

Siting of the building

The sloping terrain to the east of the primary school has been used to accommodate a lower ground floor. Thus, only half of the required building volume is visible to passers-by, and a new public space has been created between the school and the daycare centre. The eastern front of the school opens onto this space, which can be used during recesses and for official functions.

Entry to the daycare centre is from the level of the pedestrian zone. Here on the ground floor level the centre is divided into three “houses”, whose fronts have been shifted slightly out of alignment. Responding to the architectural context, the three units have varying heights and are linked to each other by means of glazed connectors that are flooded with daylight. All classrooms are south-facing, while multi-purpose activity areas have a northerly orientation towards the pedestrian zone or a westerly one on the lower ground floor.

The differentiated building units have been designed in relation to the nearby primary school and their dimensions take into account the perception and identity of the child. The differently shaped “houses” help children get their bearings and understand the spatial and social organization of the centre. The children feel at home in “their” respective houses.

Access and general layout

The centre is reached on foot from the pedestrian zone via a level entry area (+3.84m=1,223.8m). The entry level ground floor contains two classrooms, plus sanitary facilities and cloakrooms, the personnel area with two offices, and a multi-purpose area with a “parents’ corner”.

The entry area is situated between two houses. The cloakroom area, which receives ample daylight and can also be used as an additional activity area, is laid out like a small passageway between the two houses. Its many openings connect it to the community life, and it functions as an extension of the public space inside the daycare centre.

A staircase and lift connect the entry level floor to the lower ground floor. This contains a room intended for physical activities or as a rest area, a second multi-purpose room, a teaching kitchen and a third classroom on the southern front. Although only the western and southern sections of the lower ground floor protrude from the sloping terrain, two skylights ensure that ample daylight reaches the cloakroom area and classroom.

Classrooms

We have aimed at creating differentiated spatial structures, rooms that provide as much potential as possible to stimulate children’s independent activities, orientation, communication, social interaction and aesthetic receptiveness. Rooms that can be flexibly used as stages for children’s activities, but also as quiet retreats.

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The ground floor classrooms incorporate two levels: with connecting bridges, galleries and air space, they offer a variety of spatial experiences and lines of sight. Larch-panelled galleries sit like birds’ nests on the exposed concrete structures, and two bridges connect to the common physical activity area. Different views from the windows around the daycare centre pull the surrounding mountain scenery deep into the building.

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With nearly 80 m2 of floor space, the classroom on the lower ground floor is the largest of the three classrooms. It is designed in simple, clear lines. One half of the room opens up conically towards the sky, with light entering unobtrusively via the large skylight. The other half of the room opens up towards the garden on two sides, letting in the outside scenery. From each classroom, the children can access the garden via a wood-decked patio in front of the classroom.

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The central multi-purpose room is located on the lower ground floor. Large sliding doors can be opened to connect it to the open space between the daycare centre and the school. A divider element provides sufficient storage space for materials needed for various activities, but can also be used as a walk-in sculpture by the children, offering sitting niches, wall bars and a fold-away slide inside.

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Staff rooms and other facilities

Staff rooms are located close to the entrance in one of the three “houses”. The kitchen is located on the lower ground floor, deliveries can be made from the adjacent open area.

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Open spaces

Responding to the sloping terrain, the child daycare centre becomes a hybrid creation, a cross between built structure and landscape: indoor and outdoor spaces flow into each other, and the roof has been turned into a garden space accessible from the upper floor. Beyond, the natural landscape outside merges with the playground. The adjacent playground and park and the nearby meadow and forest areas provide an extraordinarily rich variety of open spaces for the children.

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Materials

The choice of materials has been based on the guiding principle of building something special amid an everyday environment. Traditional elements have been reinterpreted from a contemporary perspective to create new qualities: the building takes up time-honoured patterns and combines them with new phenomena of global modernity. All outer building walls are double-layered, exposed white concrete; wood formwork was used for construction. Roofing is made of hand-cut larch shingles. Part of the lower ground floor wall is covered in vertical larch cladding that surrounds the large window openings. Exposed concrete has also been used for the entry area, making for clearly delineated built structures. Wood has been used exclusively for the gallery level.

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Energy efficiency

Thanks to its compact construction, optimized insulation and choice of materials, as well as installation of a hygienic ventilation system with significant heat recovery rates, the building has received an excellent energy efficiency rating (“KlimaHaus A”, i.e. heating energy requirement less than 30 kWh/m² p.a.). The daycare centre is connected to a remote heating facility which runs on wood chips, i.e. a renewable energy source. Within the building, heat is distributed via an underfloor heating system, ensuring maximum comfort for the children. High air quality is maintained by means of a mechanical ventilation system which has been designed to meet the hygienic requirements and deliver high heat recovery rates, further reducing heating energy consumption. Lighting and temperature control for the various rooms and areas, as well as shading of the glazed areas, are controlled via a bus system which is also designed for optimum user comfort and energy efficiency.

Project type: Realization
Location: 39030 Terenten (Italy)

Architect and Construction Manager: feld72 architekten zt GmbH – Vienna/Bolzano

Project partners:
Structural engineer: Obrist&Partner Kaltern
MEP engineer: energytech gmbh, Bolzano

Construction period: 12 months
Net usable floor space: 1,045 m2

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Infant Educational Centre by Solinas + Verd Arquitectos	Kindergarten Kekec by Arhitektura Jure Kotnik	Kindergarten Sighartstein by Kadawittfeldarchitektur

SCAD’s Industrial Design department is gearing up for their New Show 2011, their year-end exhibit that opens this Friday. The dedicated website loaded up with preview images of student work looks pretty darn good, and they’ve even got teaser videos up on Vimeo. While the videos don’t show much in the way of finished work, if you’re a high school student wondering what your time would look like spent in a college-level ID program, here’s a snippet:

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This group of schools outside Paris by French architects Dominique Coulon & Associés has walls, ceilings and details picked out in bright orange.

The Josephine Baker schools include a primary school on the west of the site and a nursery school to the east.

Classrooms in the nursery are located on a floor that cantilevers across the building’s entrance.

The project includes playgrounds for both older and younger children, a canteen and a library, as well as a sports ground on the library roof.

Internally, brightly coloured hooks fill the walls outside of the classrooms, giving children a place to hang their coats.

More stories about educational buildings on Dezeen »

Above: Photograph by Olivier Nicollas

More stories about projects in France on Dezeen »

Above: Photograph by Olivier Nicollas

Photography is by Eugeni Pons apart from where stated.

Here are some further details from the architects:

The ‘Josephine Baker’ group of schools recently completed by Dominique Coulon in La Courneuve manages to fit into the difficult context of the ‘Cité des 4000’ neighbourhood, on a site marked by the painful memory of the demolition of the ‘Ravel’ and ‘Presov’ longitudinal blocks of flats. However, it is also capable of opening up inside itself, creating a different landscape, a different place, a utopia.

Above: Photograph by Olivier Nicollas

The project is part of the very subtle town planning scheme adopted by Bernard Paurd, in an attempt to pull together the different signs and traces that are superposed on the site like the various writings on a palimpsest.

The scheme reorganises the neighbourhood on the basis of the right-angled intersection of two historic axes, one leading from Paris – from the Saint-Michel fountain – to St Denis’ Cathedral, the other starting from the cathedral and heading towards St Lucien’s church.

This crossing of X and Y axes highlights the surfacing of various traces – ruins of a Gallo-Roman necropolis stand where the scarred landscape bears witness to the demolition of the ‘Ravel’ and ‘Presov’ blocks of flats, dynamited on 23 June 2004. As if the map had marked the territory with a tattoo.

Above: Photograph by Delphine George

The group of schools occupies a trapezoid-shaped plot of land obliterated by the non-aedificandi area corresponding to the location of one of the two buildings that were demolished.

Dominique Coulon stays in line with the scheme and the intentions of Bernard Paurd, but seems to consider this scar as the substratum for an act of resilience – a psychological process analysed by Boris Cyrulnik that makes it possible to overcome traumatic situations – rather than the stigma of an irreversible situation. He thus returns spontaneously to his work on twisting shapes, a theme that recurs constantly in his projects.

The requirement to refrain from constructing closed volumes based on the rectangle that is a feature of the plot of land, combined with the constraints in terms of density and height, has enabled him to question the separation of the primary and nursery schools in the brief.

His proposal therefore sketches out a unitary organisation, deployed with virtuoso skill in the three dimensions of the space between two poles linked by a system of ramps. Thus the nursery school classrooms are pushed to the east, on a floor cantilevered above the entrance, and the primary school classrooms occupy areas to the west overlooking interstitial gardens.

The older children’s playground merges into the area reserved for the younger children, which already contains the shared canteen, while the sports areas have been placed on the roof of the other block, which contains the library shared by the two schools.

Despite its sliding volumes, folds and asymmetry, the building gives a first impression of an enclosed shape with few openings. The primary school classrooms, superposed on the site, only opens up to any real extent to their gardens at the side. Although on the outside the verticality is dominant as a result of the many indentations that break up the façades, it is paradoxically the horizontal aspect that is more evident once through the entrance.

As if an infinite universe was opening up inside a strictly defined area, welcoming a heterotopia reserved for the children. An initiatory place where the pupils can be cut off from the adult world, so that they can adopt the necessary distance and momentum the better to dive into it in due course.

Particular attention seems to have been paid to passages from one space to another, to thresholds: entering the school, taking off your coat and hanging it up before going through the door into the classroom and sitting down in front of the teacher; laughing as you leave the classroom, and shouting out in the playground at playtime. That is how the building works, from the entrance onwards, in a subtle two-fold movement of advance and retreat.

An arrangement that recalls the curves and counter-curves of the façade of the St-Charles-aux-Quatre-Fontaines church completed in 1667 by Francesco Borromini. In a protective gesture, the upper floor projects forwards to welcome the children, while the glazed ground floor withdraws and digs in to defuse the drama of separating the child from its parents.

The corridors change shape and expand in front of the classroom doors and receive abundant natural light from the zenith, as if the better to define themselves as areas for decompression before taking a deep breath and plunging into the work areas. Lastly, the canopy of the playground thrusts out well beyond the ramp that leads up to the rooftop sport areas.

This play of compression and expansion, giving an organic feel to the concrete structure, is further accentuated by use of the colour orange. It covers the floors and occasionally spills over onto the walls and ceilings, rendering the slightest ray of sunshine incandescent and lighting up the roof area.

This has the appearance of an open hand beneath the complementary blue of the sky, revealed in all its power. All too frequently, as in Jules Ferry’s time, schools seem to be designed as areas for adults reduced to the scale of children. The sequences of traffic paths and classrooms are witness here to a different relationship between the child’s body and space, one that is all the more fused together in that is it not yet totally mediatised by language.

The classrooms, corridors and playgrounds of the ‘Josephine Baker’ schools stretch out and break up around an indefinite body, a body in perpetual transformation, a body of feelings ready to be touched by the slightest ray of sunshine and to perceive a thousand opportunities for play in the slightest variation in the weather.

The use of natural products – such as linoleum on the floors, and wood for the door and window frames – and the attention paid even to the smallest details contribute to making the building an almost luxurious place, a place hailed enthusiastically at its inauguration by a population of parents and pupils who are keen to turn the page of the demolitions and look resolutely to the future.

Type of project: Group of schools (nursery + primary)
Client: City of La Courneuve
Team: Dominique Coulon & Associés, Architectes
Dominique Coulon, Olivier Nicollas, Architectes
Sarah Brebbia, Benjamin Rocchi, Arnaud Eloudyi, Florence Haenel, Architects assistants

Batiserf: Structural Engineer: Philippe Clement, Cécile Plumier, Frédéric Blanc
G. Jost, Mechanical Engineer : Marc Damant, Annie Pikard
E3 Economie : Cost calculation
Bruno Kubler : Paysagiste

Program: Lecture room, auditorium, administration
Primary school – 10 classrooms
Nursery – 6 classrooms
Leisure center – 6 classrooms
Restaurant
Office for the academy

Above: Photograph by Olivier Nicollas

Surface Area: 4500 m2 SHON, 6500 m2 SHOB
Cost: 8 000 000 euros H.T

See also:

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Médiathèque d’Anzin by Dominique Coulon	Tellus Nursery School by Tham & Videgård	Azahar School by Julio Barreno

This medical research building at the University of California in San Francisco by Rafael Viñoly Architects projects out from a forest hillside, supported on steel truss stems that fan upwards from the ground.

Designed to accomodate 125 individual biology laboratories for scientists studying stem-cell treatment, the building has one laboratory floor split into four levels, which step down half a storey at a time as they descend the hill.

Offices are located above each level, connected by a stepped circulation route on the exterior of the building which also bridges across to the adjacent medical centre.

The building has south-facing glazing to maximise natural light into the laboratories and offices.

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The following is from the architects:

Stem Cell Building at UCSF by Rafael Viñoly Architects:

San Francisco, California: Rafael Viñoly Architects’ design of the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building at the University of California, San Francisco has been completed.

The project is targeting LEED Gold certification. DPR Construction served as the design-build contractor and the Smith Group served as executive architect. The University held a grand opening celebration of the building on February 9, 2011.

Located on a steeply sloping urban hillside, the Dolby regeneration medicine building presented the design team a unique challenge: executing a horizontal structure on an uneven site.

RVA responded by creating a beautifully sinuous, serpentine building that makes use of every foot of available space.

The main floor functions as one continuous laboratory divided into four split levels, each stepping down a half-story as the building descends the forested hillside slope, and each level is topped by an office cluster and a grass roof with wildflowers and plants.

Exterior ramps and stairs, taking advantage of the temperate climate, provide continuous circulation between all levels, and the facility connects to three nearby research buildings and UCSF Medical Center via a pedestrian bridge.

The building structure is supported by steel space trusses springing from concrete piers, minimizing site excavation and incorporating seismic base isolation to absorb earthquake forces.

Inside the building, the transitions between the split levels are designed as hubs of activity. Break rooms and stairs located at these interfaces increase the potential for chance interaction – a goal for promoting a cross-pollination of ideas among the scientists –  and interior glazing maximizes visual connectivity between the lower labs and the upper offices.

To further promote collaboration, the laboratories occupy a horizontal open-floor plan, with a flexible, custom-designed casework system that enables the rapid reconfiguration of the research program.

Abundant south-facing glazing fills the open laboratories and offices with natural light and views of the wooded slope of Mount Sutro nearby.

Green roof terraces impart environmental benefits and an outdoor amenity for building occupants and campus community.

Visible from surrounding campus buildings’ upper floors, the terraces create a welcoming transitional space where the dense campus meets the forest.

The Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building is the headquarters for The Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF, which extends across all UCSF campuses.

The Center encompasses 125 labs made up of scientists exploring the earliest stages of animal and human development.

The goal of these studies is to understand how disorders and diseases develop and how they could be treated based on the knowledge of, and use of, stem cells and other early-stage cells.

The Institute’s mission is to translate basic research findings to clinical research and on to patient care.

Scientists in the Institute will work closely with clinical researchers at UCSF Medical Center, located nearby, to translate discoveries into therapeutic strategies.

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United States Senate by Rafael Viñoly	Cleveland Museum of Art by Rafael Viñoly	Medical Centre by Doblee Architects