Description

The new school is located on a high plateau overlooking the city of Marcelin sur Morges in the Swiss canton of Vaud. Because of its history and its setting, the new school cannot be separated from its specific context. Marcelin also has an agricultural school and thus a long tradition of working with the land’s own unique agrarian culture. This is an area which is extremely close to the land. One of the most obvious features, which establishes this theme, are the gardens and cultivation areas which surround the new building. They are distinctive school features within the region which link the culture of the land directly to the educational curriculum of most local schools. You approach the school through these green areas, a rustic threshold for the modern yet sophisticated architecture of the new building. The most dominant element on the site is a triple-height sports hall and a double-height multi-functional hall for assemblies and other community uses which reflect each other across the campus. These two spaces form a shared community zone for what is effectively two schools in one, an agricultural vocational school and a long standing secondary grammar school housed in the more glazed wing of new accommodation dedicated to academic subjects. There is a traditional turn of the century arts and crafts building, which engages the main courtyard on its fourth side. The new vocational school comprises a centre for training in agricultural science and management with approximately 40 classes and associated support spaces, offices, a dining hall and kitchen. Within the small village community of Marcelin, it is like a new town quarter.

The structure of the new development has a strong architectural presence, with buildings organised around a lower open courtyard, which acts as a kind of sheltered interface between the different wings of accommodation. It has a hard formal spatiality, almost urban in quality, and stands in stark contrast to the surround­ing residential settlements. There is a horizontal hierarchy to the new structures with lightweight glazed pavilion type buildings which appear to float on top of a more solid single-storey base or podium. The roof of this podium provides a large roof top deck at second floor level as the classroom blocks step back from the inner edges of the small courtyard to form this larger rooftop courtyard. It is a clever play of scale and form variation to create a sophisticated urban architectural language which is dense yet never over-bearing. Each part of the form is articulated in a slightly different way to provide a rich and varied contemporary environment.

The building’s functions are articulated externally in three different fenestration types: firstly a more solid ‘hole in wall’ type of architecture, which is predominantly ground based and utilised within the internal faces of the building. So the ground and first floor courtyard accommodation encloses lounge and recreation areas, private rooms for tutorials and meetings, the type of spaces which are more intimate and small scale. Secondly there is a horizontally orientated form of fenestration which is still solid and regular, but not fully glazed. This marks the external classroom façades to the vocational school, presenting a wall-like secure face to the surrounding streets. Thirdly there are fully glazed screen façades which look into the courtyard, again enclosing classrooms of the academic grammar school. They benefit from the north-facing aspect, thus taking advantage of good light and limited solar penetration.

The new buildings are articulated across the stylish rooftop courtyard space which reunites the vocational school and the grammar school. Its internal volumes concentrate on communal activities, emphasising what the students have in common, rather than their relative academic differences, providing spaces which encourage chance meetings through a sort of promenade sequence of stairs and corridors which run throughout both school buildings. Corner points are treated with particular care, so that the collision of various different forms of architecture are managed spatially to provide linking routes which emphasise threshold yet at the same time are attractive extensions of space. The multi-purpose hall is marked by a series of linked balconies which connect rather than separate spaces. Students from the two schools can enter this space seamlessly. Everything is treated with extreme care so that the end result are high quality school buildings which enthuse children and staff alike and have a type of non-hierarchical architectural spirit which is very unusual and successful.

This project does not set out to be spectacular architecturally, rather it tries hard to integrate itself into the existing context whilst presenting a new and stylish school building fit for the 21st century. It has complexity yet also a strong ordering principle with the use of two large volumes which are a signature for the new development. The blocks are unified at the ground and first floor levels by way of a base building block. Each of the two main blocks are orientated within the topography in a distinctive way: the vocational centre within the rupture of the hill, with stone walls and deep window reveals which draw attention to interior activities, reinforces the massiveness and plasticity of the volume, whereas the secondary school is placed on a horizontal plain of the higher plateau and is expressed by way of curtain wall glazing, all lightness and transparency. The result is a new hybrid form of school building, which dissipates the problems of selecting students for a particular stream of learning too early.

---

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