Denmark-based architects CEBRA have won a competition to design a Smart School educational complex in Irkutsk, Russia. Their winning design, dubbed Smart School Meadow, fulfills the competition’s call for a new typology of school that combines architecture and landscaping into a learning environment and local community center.
The design integrates buildings and landscape together through a ring of individual structures connected by a large, ridged rooftop. With this roof, spaces between the buildings can be used as multifunctional, semi-covered learning spaces, activity zones, and flow areas, all of which diffuse into the central and outer landscaped areas.
With the concept of responsive spaces in mind, each building’s learning spaces are built not “specifically to the classic subjects such as math, biology, or music, but to the activities related to them,” which “expands their classical use and incorporates an activity based on functionality. This means that the school’s different spaces hold different spatial qualities, which suit certain activities or subjects, but are not limited to one singular use.”
Overall, the Smart School complex will accommodate 1,040 students from ages three to 18, and over 400 professional staff members in a pre-school, junior high, and high school, “as well as cultural, leisure, and health centers, which are accessible to the public.”
Because the school will have a minimum of 15% of the student body reserved for orphans and children with limited physical capabilities, the site will additionally “contain a special settlement, where orphaned children live with their foster families.”
Learn more about the project here.
Architects: CEBRA, UNK project, VEGA landskab, Niras
Location: Irkutsk, Russia
Project size: 31,100 m2 (20 ha master plan)
Award: 1st prize in invited international design competition
News via CEBRA architecture.
