Labics

BEIC Milano

BEIC Milano

Obicà @ via Cusani, Milan

The new spaces inside CUBO: an innovative building for education

Fontana Candida Elementary School in Rome

The Fontana Candida project is a second-phase competition entry for an elementary school in Rome. Its concept derives from a reinterpretation of the typological studies and research on educational buildings carried out in the 1950s and 1960s by Van Eyck, Smithson, Jacobsen, and Hertzberger, aiming for a new kind of school—open and community-based. But unlike most of the projects of that time, which are rigorous in their concept but too often disconnected from the context, the school in Fontana Candida aims to establish a strong relationship with the surrounding landscape. The nature of the site, a spacious park on the outskirts of the city, served as inspiration to pursue a multifaceted relationship between school and landscape, in between disappearance and figuration.

The resulting single-story building is characterized by a wide green roof. Seen from above, it seems to be part of the natural background, its natural extension. A pattern of differently sized squares integrates the building and the territory, progressively transforming the initial typology of a linear scheme that faces the street to one of pavilions that look towards the park, a sequence of independent cells that define the different areas of the school. These characteristics provide the project with a structural ambiguity; it seems to be intersected by an unstable duplicity: unity/diversity, closed/open, static/dynamic, artificial/natural. The building is therefore an open figure defined by a continuous and multiple spatiality where streets and squares, private and public spaces, open and closed areas, interiors and exteriors all follow one another in a continuous pattern.

Fontana Candida Elementary School in Rome

The Fontana Candida project is a second-phase competition entry for an elementary school in Rome. Its concept derives from a reinterpretation of the typological studies and research on educational buildings carried out in the 1950s and 1960s by Van Eyck, Smithson, Jacobsen, and Hertzberger, aiming for a new kind of school—open and community-based. But unlike most of the projects of that time, which are rigorous in their concept but too often disconnected from the context, the school in Fontana Candida aims to establish a strong relationship with the surrounding landscape. The nature of the site, a spacious park on the outskirts of the city, served as inspiration to pursue a multifaceted relationship between school and landscape, in between disappearance and figuration.

The resulting single-story building is characterized by a wide green roof. Seen from above, it seems to be part of the natural background, its natural extension. A pattern of differently sized squares integrates the building and the territory, progressively transforming the initial typology of a linear scheme that faces the street to one of pavilions that look towards the park, a sequence of independent cells that define the different areas of the school. These characteristics provide the project with a structural ambiguity; it seems to be intersected by an unstable duplicity: unity/diversity, closed/open, static/dynamic, artificial/natural. The building is therefore an open figure defined by a continuous and multiple spatiality where streets and squares, private and public spaces, open and closed areas, interiors and exteriors all follow one another in a continuous pattern.