Description

Otonoha School is a preschool situated amongst rice fields that have served the
community for years. It has a curriculum that revolves around music and
agriculture. The entire first floor of the two-storey building has been designed
as an open-plan space that can be broken down into smaller areas with a
sophisticated system of sliding screens and semi-transparent curtains. Otonoha
is an example of open-plan learning spaces that are in many cases replacing
classrooms in schools; where open-plan spaces are broken down with changes in
level, furniture and dividing walls to support different types of learning such
as project based work, seminars, group sessions, individual study and
traditional classroom based activities.

Otonoha School provides an inspiring case study for designing open-plan education
space that can be modified by both staff and students to accommodate different
learning needs on a day-to-day basis. The grid arrangement of the nursery’s deep
roof structure, necessary to allow the space to be so open, doubles as the grid
on which the sliding walls and curtains move. Metal tracks are integrated into
the underside of the roof beams and are laid flush into the smooth timber floor
finish, therefore minimising the visual clutter that can often be associated
with such complex moving parts. The positioning of long strip skylights along
either side of the principal roof structure allows each area to be naturally lit
even when all of the sliding partitions are in place; an important consideration
for any space that is to be subdivided.

Another important factor is sound penetration. In this part of the nursery
complete acoustic separation is not achieved when the artist-designed
semi-transparent printed curtains and low-level timber furniture partitions are
slid into place due to the lightweight nature of some of the moving screens as
well as gaps above the cross beams. In this part of the building this encourages
the children to ‘feel the rhythm’ of each other in line with the school’s focus
on musical development. However, at the ground floor an arrangement of more
typical classroom spaces, with timber-clad sliding walls along just one side,
provides areas that can be completely separated both visually and
acoustically.

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Originally published in: Prue Chiles (ed.), Leo Care, Howard Evans, Anna Holder, Claire Kemp, Building Schools: Key Issues for Contemporary Design, Birkhäuser, 2015.