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Architects: CAN Architects
- Area: 2025 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Alex Shoots Buildings
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Lead Architects: András Cseh, Ádám Tátrai, Dávid Németh, József Élő, Szilárd Köninger
Text description provided by the architects. The Elementary School of Szentpéterfa introduces a new model of school architecture in Hungary. Its intensive participatory design was complemented with years of multidisciplinatory research to implement a wide range of learning and social spaces. The school integrates indoor and outdoor learning landscapes, a learning canopy and two steps in the evolution of the classroom: the Alcoved Classrooms as the further development of the L-shaped classroom and the very first Turning Classrooms in the world.
Szentpéterfa has been a strong community for centuries: a Croatian minority settlement on the Hungarian-Austrian border. It has preserved its strong identity through the integration of contemporary innovations into carefully preserved traditions. At the beginning of the 1990s, teaching orientation among the endless possibilities of the new political and social system was already formulated with the need for a new school building that helps these processes. After three decades of preparatory work, the local municipality commissioned CAN Architects to prepare the plans for a future, innovative school. The choice reflected the architect group’s recent work based on research and participatory design, the aim to understand the connections between learning spaces and processes and to establish the resulting pedagogical-architectural possibilities in Hungarian school architecture.
The participarory design took place during the coronavirus pandemic, accordingly on a smaller scale, with fewer contacts, ibut with more direct and effective communication with the commissioning teacher, student and municipality representatives. It soon became clear that the community is fully open to the pedagogical and spatial innovations previously developed by the designers: they want customized classrooms for different age groups, a learning landscape that expands formal learning, and public spaces that serve the entire village community - both indoors and outdoors. The participarory design was not only intense during the definition of the design program: pedagogical developments, the school's innovative curriculum, day-to-day monitoring of construction, planning, testing and fine-tuning the use of the new spaces appeared with the same weight as the joint planning and building of the playground with students.
The birth of the new school is a long, organic story. The old school has been operating at two locations at the ends of the village until now. With this transition it moves to one location, where the entire learning community is together, and neither students nor teachers have to commute between distant buildings during the day. Just as the preparation of the plan took almost 30 years, the plan also contains several phases. The most important step of which is the building complex that has just been completed, which can be further developed in the coming decades, according to the economic possibilities of the settlement, with the internal transformation of the connected former doctor’s practice and the construction of a small gym.
The old school building on the site, which accommodated half of the students studying here, was transformed into a lower school cluster (6-10 years). The Alcoved Classrooms were supplemented with a soft alcove, raised to seat height, which is a space for reading stories, moving, and retreating within the class, where you can even study lying down. In this way, the teacher gets the opportunity to change positions and move around with the children in the classroom. In addition to the alcove, a storage unit ensures that the many necessary teaching aids do not cause visual overload in the classroom and thus it is easier to pay attention.
The lower school cluster is organized by a spacious learning landscape, a space for meeting and movement, with a huge blackboard in the center, which invites children to experience creativity and shape the environment every day.
The teacher's office is also located in this building so that the teachers are close to the smaller children. The strongest visual opening of the space towards the inner courtyard and the upper school cluster interprets the home of the teaching community as the watchful host of the entire building complex.
The new upper school cluster built inside the site speaks its own language of space and form. The Turning Classroom is the most radical innovation of the plan. This space is expected to serve the various pedagogical needs of students with 10-14 years. Its geometry was developed by the design team based on pedagogic, environmental psychology, school architecture, acoustics and lighting research during their past school architecture work.
Turning towards the different sides of the floor plan provides a characteristically different sense of space, which can be ideally used in different pedagogical situations. For frontal education, it is best to turn to one of the original sides of the square with a right angle - then the room can be perceived almost as a traditional space. For group work or individual creative problem solving, students find themselves in a dynamic position by turning towards the shortest side, while facing the longest side perceives the classroom as more spacious with a comfortable feeling in the case of class debates. These are the world's first Turning Classrooms. The importance of innovation appeared throughout the process: the baseline for setting out was made jointly with the children and their teachers, and currently a multidisciplinary research group of ELTE is measuring their pedagogical and environmental psychological impact.
The learning landscape connecting the classrooms includes a central staircase (named Gengülő/Ganginger by the local students), the dining room, an indoor ping-pong and an outdoor yoga terrace, while the science room on the ground floor can also be opened up towards the central space in case of events for the whole school community.
As a continuation of Hungarian rural architectural tradition, the learning clusters are connected by a huge canopy, which also functions as an outdoor classroom for a significant part of the school year. Its red color was applied according to the client's wishes that Croatian identity should be easily read somewhere on the building. The color of the šahovnica, the red and white checkered central coat of arms in the Croatian flag, is a strong identity carrier, so its color is used in this central in-between space, while the buildings have simple, light gray plastered facades.
The scale of the function is large compared to the village texture, therefore it was split into differents volumes to keep the scale of the school buildings proportional to its built environment. The organic connection with the settlement is provided by the school yard, playground and sports park open to everyone outside of school hours, and by the red porch gate that invites you in from the street. The constant integration of the interior spaces is aided by pictorial openings cut out towards the landscape, the village and the inner courtyard, so the children do not disappear into the virtual space of the school, but even when they are here, they continuously perceive themselves as part of their wider community.
