stará boleslav primary school

Our solution took advantage of the configuration of the area and the triangular shape of the land on the outskirts of the city. By carving out a triad of segments, we created three complementary worlds. First, a world of quiet public foreground interacting with the city at ground level. Next, the world of an intimate, safe school garden, dedicated especially to younger children. And finally, the world of activity, sports, and school and public events tied to the gym and the outdoor playground. There is no need to insert fences between these worlds – the school building separates them. The building is permeable and welcoming with a simple elementary internal organisation. The building, with its structure and form, clearly acknowledges where the teaching takes place and where other activities take place outside. Viewed from the outside, it should make little difference which of the three materially constituted arms the school's client is in. The important thing is that it is always a wide-open embrace. Regarding the location of the designed building on the site, our solution's guiding principle is to work with the building as a means of segmenting the adjacent space into three distinct worlds. The relatively regular three-winged shape of the mass almost touches the boundaries of the plot with its tips, thus carving out roughly similar sectors from the triangle provided. Working with a regular isosceles tripod largely suppresses the size of the mass resulting from a bulky program. In most cases, the eye of the passer-by can only perceive 2/3 of the building's total mass. Such a large school will always contrast to the fragmented surrounding buildings. This is also why we decided to fragment – break the mass into smaller elements. We chose a block of three classrooms as the structural unit. We hung this way formed boxes on the lines of circulation. The internal common areas naturally separate the staying areas between the boxes. Another solution's intention was to suppress the bulky mass of the gym as much as possible. Therefore, we also incorporated its body inside the "train" of classes as another (somewhat oversized) wagon. Especially when it comes to public institutions such as schools, we are advocates of concise legibility and clarity of building organisation. In this respect, we can think of just a few solutions that would work more intuitively in terms of orientation than the concept we have proposed: our users enter through the centre of the funnel into the central space, from where they can clearly access all three fingers of the building.