PROJECT OVERVIEW Type: Elementary School Concept Design Location: Northern Italy (Vivaro, Friuli) Programme: Educational / Civic Scale: New-build primary school for a small urban community
THE BRIEF
The brief called for a new elementary school within a small, traditional urban context in northern Italy. The school needed to serve its immediate community — students, parents, teachers, and local residents — while fitting into a neighbourhood defined by modest scale, historic street patterns, and a strong sense of local identity.
The core challenge was not simply to design a functional school building. It was to design a building that could genuinely belong to the place — that felt like a natural part of the community rather than an institutional imposition — while delivering the spatial quality and flexibility that contemporary education requires.
THE CONCEPT
The concept is structured around the relationship between solid and void.
The solid represents the stability of structured learning: traditional classrooms, defined spaces, clear programme. The void represents the freedom of discovery: open, flexible areas where children can move, create, collaborate, and engage with each other and with the building in unscripted ways.
Rather than treating these two conditions as opposites, the design brings them into a productive dialogue. Classrooms and flexible spaces are placed in deliberate spatial relationship — close enough to flow between, distinct enough to feel different. The building teaches through its organisation as much as through what happens inside it.
THE APPROACH
The design translates the concept through four consistent spatial and material decisions.
First, the building’s layout responds to the existing urban morphology. The school engages with the street, maintains the scale of the surrounding fabric, and creates clear thresholds between public, semi-public, and private areas. The entrance is legible and welcoming — a school that opens itself to the community rather than turning inward.
Second, natural light is the primary environmental driver. Large windows are positioned to maximise daylight in classrooms throughout the day, reducing dependence on artificial lighting and creating spaces that change quality with the time and season. Skylights and light wells bring natural illumination into deeper parts of the plan. The result is a building that feels alive, connected to the outside world even when children are learning indoors.
Third, the spatial programme balances fixed and flexible. Classrooms are functional and well-proportioned — sized for focused teaching and adapted for different pedagogical approaches. Adjacent flexible spaces are equipped with movable furniture, allowing students and teachers to reconfigure their environment for group work, creative activities, or quiet study. The boundary between structured and open learning is permeable by design.
Fourth, the material palette combines industrial durability with warmth. The exterior uses white-coated steel panelling — contemporary, weather-resistant, and contextually coherent with the surrounding urban fabric. Interiors introduce warm timber surfaces alongside pops of colour through movable furniture, creating spaces that feel playful and personalised without sacrificing spatial clarity.
KEY DESIGN DECISIONS
The decision to anchor the concept in solid versus void gave the project a clear organisational logic that runs from urban strategy through to interior detail. It is not a formal gesture — it is a spatial argument about how children learn, and how a school building can support that.
The material strategy was equally deliberate. Industrial materials on the exterior ensure the building ages well in a northern Italian climate and sits confidently within its urban context. Warm, colourful interiors create the sense of belonging and safety that young children need — environments that feel made for them.
WHY THIS PROJECT MATTERS
Designing schools for small communities in traditional Italian urban contexts requires navigating between the demands of contemporary education and the constraints of local scale, heritage sensitivity, and limited budgets. This project demonstrates how a clear concept — rigorously applied from spatial organisation to material selection — can produce a school that serves its community well both functionally and architecturally.
