Description

The Flims Comprehensive School is a five-storey block building located in a semi-rural mountainous area. For cost and construction reasons the architects have rejected the usual fragmented departmental approach to school design instead combining the lower and upper school into a single unified form. On each of the main teaching levels there are seven classrooms with WCs and a common room space with an open community room. The circulation space is articulated as an L shaped ‘cut’ with a lift and two staircases which run through the entire five-storey block to provide a clear and legible organising device. Stairs are positioned at right angles to the external walls providing dramatic views to the landscape beyond. Natural light filters down by way of rooftop skylights; the lower levels of accommodation are ventilated by way of gallery cuts in each floor plate.

This unusual and modern school structure combines the lower and upper schools in one compact block. Rather like a contemporary office structure, it makes little use of traditional school iconography or scale references to the widely varying age of children using it; rather a sense of belonging comes through the subtle play of structural grids and the use of modern cladding materials on the highly reflective façades, both internally and externally. This is a grown-up piece of architecture which bestows on the children a sense of their own significance within the adult world. Ultimately its users, a close knit village community, have three buildings in one: a lower school, an upper school and a gymnasium, each of which is connected internally, and each with its own entrance. The sense of community is enhanced without losing the intimacy of the individual teaching spaces by way of this ‘magic cube’.

On the outside it appears like a solid shimmering block floating on the hilly landscape, inside it is all lightness and space with dramatic views up and down. This allows the users a real sense of what is going on in other areas as they move around the building from the inside to the outside. As the bell sounds at the end of each lesson period the atmosphere transforms dramatically, as students from all parts of the building circulate. Movement and colour is suddenly reflected via the matt black and grey façade glazing on the inside. Visual and physical contact between different year groups is encouraged in this social mixing pot.

The mix is enhanced by the way in which the younger and older students share classbases on each floor. Thus from floors 1 to 3, there are classes for both 13-16 year olds and for 7-12 year olds. With a common room dedicated to integrated age activities on each floor, the developers have managed an interesting mixed age range system, which maintains order but subtly breaks the convention of only permitting similar age students to come together in a school setting. It is a lesson in its own right.

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Originally published in: Mark Dudek, Schools and Kindergartens: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2015.