School & Interactive Learning Center

A school planned as a group of small blocks rather than one large one, so that a child's route from gate to classroom is short, shaded and legible. The space between the blocks is designed as hard as the blocks themselves.

Breaking the accommodation into blocks costs more envelope and buys back something a single mass cannot give: every classroom gets two aspects, cross-ventilation and a door onto a courtyard.

Colour is used sparingly and always to help wayfinding — a block, a stair, a door — rather than as decoration. A child who cannot yet read the signs can still find the right building.

The courtyards are shaded by canopy and by tree, and each is sized for a different age group. Break time is the busiest ten minutes in a school's day, and it is a planning problem before it is a landscape one.