School at the Center of the Future

What: School at the Center of the Future - New School Complex | Community Hub in the Don Bosco Neighborhood
Who: Municipality of Brescia
Where: Brescia - Italia
When: 2023-2024
AREA: 3400 mq
AREA49: Giacomo Penco, Marilena Magalotti, Luca Benassi, Davide Camera

The new school complex expands its functions and establishes itself as a place of attraction for the city, becoming an added value for the community. The project envisions reconnecting with the surrounding area by creating a complex of buildings immersed in the park that serve as a neighborhood attraction. The relationship between the three buildings creates an open yet defined space for interaction, and the park's design highlights the east-west and north-south visual permeability and flows. Each building maintains its functional and formal individuality, thus generating a new, structured skyline that interacts with its context through open views and visual perspectives on the landscape.

The Community Hub building is located at the center and origin of these flows and is deformed by rotating on various levels to open up to the views of the park. The project's matrix takes the volume of the existing gymnasium as its reference, and this matrix, like a Lego brick, becomes the metric for measuring the spaces that comprise the primary and secondary schools. In this way, the volumes that make up the two school buildings are articulated and developed. The Hub also draws on the same matrix, which in this case is oriented and deformed to facilitate interaction with the external space and the view of the park. The introduction of curved connecting elements, which become a distinctive feature of the volumes' design, stems precisely from the need for a more organic relationship with the greenery and the outdoors, and for a more ergonomic spatiality suited to student use.