Hasta La Ideas

Belgian studio WE-S Architecten has created a nursery in the town of Aartselaar that takes the form of a nine-sided pavilion, intended to blend in with the surrounding park.

The compact building in Belgium provides four classrooms, a dining area and staff spaces, which are organised radially around a skylit hall to allow them to “visually flow into each other”.

Sheltered by the overhanging roof, the classrooms look inwards onto the central hall through full-height glazing and outwards to the park through large windows on the exterior.

“The nursery school is tailored to the children in terms of both scale and layout: no strictly separated classrooms, but spaces that visually flow into each other,” said WE-S Architecten partner Edward Weysen.

“The school building is located in a residential, suburban area, and therefore tries to create an introverted and secure atmosphere in order to limit the nuisance to the adjacent homes,” he told Dezeen.

“That is why the classrooms were oriented around a communal hall that is illuminated from above.”

The classrooms themselves have been organised back-to-back, allowing them to be combined into larger spaces when necessary as well as being easily observed from the staff spaces.

Between the classrooms are shared facilities such as toilets, storage, a kitchen and a dining area, provided with more privacy by wood plank cladding on the building’s exterior.

At the front of the building, two segments have been removed from the nine-sided form to create an external, covered entrance and play area, with a tree that protrudes through a roof cut-out.

The shallow-pitched roof that tops the nursery features a large overhang to provide sheltered areas around its perimeter, with several sides featuring concrete benches.

The wooden beams on the underside of the roof have been left exposed, and in each corner, the structure is supported by large, curving wooden columns.

Inside, the structure’s radial beams have also been left visible in the central hall, with the classrooms finished with timber panelling and floors and metal window frames in pale green to further blend in with the park.

“The roof extends 1.75 metres so that the bench remains sheltered and covered. In addition, this accentuates the roof shield as a load-bearing tent structure,” Weysen told Dezeen.

“The building therefore seems to blend effortlessly into the wooded environment and can be read as a modest garden pavilion rather than an institutional building,” he concluded.

Ghent-based WE-S Architecten is led by Edward Weysen and Thomas Dierickx. Its previous projects include a long extension to a bungalow in Pittem clad in redbrick.

Other nurseries on Dezeen include Kindergarten of Museum Forest in China by Atelier Apeiron and Větrník Kindergarten in the Czech Republic by Architektura.

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