- region:
2025 m²
year:
2023
-
Main architects:
Andras Czeh, Adam Tatrai, David Nemeth, Josef Elo, Szilard Koninger
Textual description provided by the architects. Szentpéterfa Primary School presents a new model for school architecture in Hungary. Its extensive participatory design has been complemented by years of interdisciplinary research to implement a wide range of educational and social spaces. The school integrates indoor and outdoor learning views, a teaching canopy and two steps in the evolution of the classroom: Alcoved classrooms as a further development of the L-shaped classroom and the world’s first rotatable classrooms.
Szentpéterfa has been a strong community for centuries: a Croat minority settlement on the Austro-Hungarian border. It has maintained its strong identity by incorporating contemporary innovations into carefully preserved traditions. At the beginning of the 1990s, the orientation of teaching was already formulated between the endless possibilities of the new political and social system with the need for a new school building conducive to these processes. After three decades of preparatory work, the local municipality commissioned CAN Architects to prepare plans for an innovative future school. The selection reflects the recent work of the architect group based on research and participatory design, with the aim of understanding the connections between learning spaces and processes and creating the resulting architectural pedagogical possibilities in Hungarian school architecture.
The participatory design was implemented during the coronavirus pandemic, and therefore on a smaller scale, with fewer contacts, but with more direct and effective communication with the assigned teacher, students and municipality representatives. It quickly became clear that the community was quite open to the pedagogical and spatial innovations that the designers had previously developed: they wanted classrooms tailored to different age groups, an educational landscape that expanded formal learning, and public spaces that served the entire village community—both indoors and outdoors. Participatory design was not only intense during the definition of the design programme: pedagogical developments, innovative school curricula, daily monitoring of the construction, planning, testing and fine-tuning of the use of the new spaces featured with the same weight as the co-planning and construction of the playground with the students.
The birth of the new school is a long organic story. The old school operates in two locations on the outskirts of the village so far. With this move, it moves to a single location, where the entire learning community comes together, and neither students nor teachers have to move between distant buildings during the day. Just as the preparation of the plan took approximately 30 years, the plan also contains several stages. Its most important step is the just completed building complex, which could be further developed in the coming decades, according to the economic potential of the settlement, with the internal transformation of the connected former doctor’s practice and the construction of a small gymnasium.
The old school building on the site, which housed half the students who studied here, has been converted into a lower group of schools (6-10 years). Alcoved’s classrooms are completed with a soft alcove, raised to seat height, which is a space for reading stories, moving around, and being alone inside the classroom, where you can even study while lying down. In this way, the teacher gets the opportunity to change positions and move around with the children in the classroom. In addition to the alcove, the storage unit ensures that many necessary teaching aids do not cause visual overload in the classroom and are therefore easier to pay attention to.
The primary school group is organized through a spacious learning landscape, a space for meeting and movement, with a huge blackboard in the centre, which invites children to experience creativity and shape the environment every day.
The teacher’s office is also located in this building so that teachers are close to the young children. The strongest visual opening of the space towards the inner courtyard and the upper school group interprets the teaching community house as the watchful host of the entire building complex.
The cluster of new secondary schools built within the site speaks its own language of space and form. The Turning Classroom is the most radical innovation in the plan. This space is expected to serve the various educational needs of students between the ages of 10 and 14 years. Its architecture was developed by the design team based on research of educational and environmental psychology, school architecture, acoustics and lighting during their previous architectural work at the school.
Shifting towards different sides of the floor plan provides a distinctly different sense of space, which can be perfectly used in different pedagogical situations. For frontal education, it is better to turn one of the original sides of the box at a right angle – then the room can be considered almost as a traditional space. For group work or individual creative problem solving, students find themselves in a dynamic position by facing towards the shorter side, while facing the longer side the classroom is perceived as more spacious with a sense of comfort in the case of class discussions. These are the first classrooms in the world. The importance of innovation emerged throughout the process: the launch baseline was established jointly with the children and their teachers, and an interdisciplinary research group of ELTE is currently measuring their psycho-educational and environmental impact.
The educational landscape connecting the classrooms includes a central staircase (local students call it Gengülő/Ganginger), dining room, indoor table tennis and outdoor yoga terrace, while the science room on the ground floor can also be opened towards the central space in case of events for the entire school community.
As a continuation of Hungarian rural architectural traditions, the learning groups are linked by a massive canopy, which also serves as an outdoor classroom for much of the school year. The red color was applied according to the client’s wish that the Croatian ID could be easily read somewhere in the building. The color of šahovnica, the central red-and-white-checkered emblem of the Croatian flag, is a strong identity holder, so its color is used in this central space, while the buildings have simple light-grey stuccoed facades.
The size of the function is large compared to the fabric of the village, so it has been divided into different sizes to keep the size of the school buildings in proportion to its built environment. The organic connection to the settlement is provided by the schoolyard, the playground and the sports park open to everyone outside school hours, and by the red porch gate that invites you to enter from the street. The continuous integration of the interior spaces is supported by pictorial openings cut towards the landscape, the village and the inner courtyard, so that the children do not disappear into the virtual space of the school, but even when they are here, they are constantly aware of themselves as part of their wider community.
(Tags for translation)Architecture