Location_Pordenone, Italy
Year_2018
Area_5617 sqm
Client_Istituto Comprensivo Pordenone Torre
Service_Preliminary project for competition

The project concerns the demolition and reconstruction, on the same plot, of a middle school. Among the goals: improve the general functionality, reaching a very high level of energy efficiency / seismic safety, and above all, to express iconically the peculiarity of the school, namely the specialization in music education.

The project transforms the old school into a bright and fluid space, open up to the city through a civic center and an auditorium. From it unravels the school space, by an architectural promenade that alternates openspaces and more enclosed areas, in an engaging spatial continuum, where children live spaces designed to host collective and autonomous activities often different from the classic frontal lesson.

The organization of the building site process is based on a logical succession of construction phases, designed to ensure didactic continuity in the same plot. During the construction site, the old school therefore remains fully functional. Only once the new construction will be finished, the central nucleus of the old building will be demolished.

The auditorium, that’s a brand new function implanted on site, is raised above the ground level, making its shape intelligible from afar. Its intrados, like the case of a mandolin, covers a large portico.
The auditorium thus manages to lighten of the volumetric impact of the school, thanks to its parade shape. The covered square below gives to the complex a strong public character.
The atrium of the school serves as a vestibule for both the teaching area and the auditorium.
The latter has a series of dedicated functions such as bathrooms, dressing rooms, wardrobes. Being located on the first floor, they do not interfere with daily school functionality.

The ground floor of the school is dedicated to community functions.
The first function is the parents interview office, connected to the secretariat and the professors’ room. Then the janitorial room, the library, the canteen and some laboratories.
A large staircase leads to the first floor. Here there is an additional area dedicated to special classrooms used by the pupils of each section, then the cluster of the first classes. In the middle of the floor there is another staircase connecting the first floor to the second. The latter houses the two clusters of the second and third classes.
Each floor has toilets for pupils and teachers, as well as fire escape staircases in order to ensure maximum safety.
The connection with the gym is on the ground floor. A glass pavillon serves as filter room, providing a dedicated entrance for those who use the sports facility outside school hours.
The locker rooms are organized in a linear volume that runs along the side of the gym.
On top of it run a small spectator stand.

Volume of the project is about 30.436 cubic meters, divided as follows: Auditorium 3.260 m3, Agorà 3.299 m3, Teaching area 15.147 m3, Gym 8.730 m3.
The useful area of the proposed project is 5.617 square meters, divided as follows: Auditorium 383 sqm, Agorà 477 sqm, Teaching area 3.884 sqm, Gym 873 sqm.
The project generously sizes the Agorà and Auditorium, to raise them to the rank of public endowment of urban significance.
Corridors are also large and flow onto glass surfaces overlooking the surrounding gardens.

The need to organize the construction site in coexistence with school activities, necessarily leads to the use of lightweight technologies and dry assembly construction processes, capable of generating the least possible amount of dust, noise and vehicle traffic.
Structural beams in laminated wood, floor slabs and dividing walls in X-lam, make the school a substantially prefabricated building that can be assembled in a few weeks using dry technologies.

The façade cladding skin, a thermally treated wooden slatted plank, unifies the parts of the building in a single warm and organic language, making the building’s wooden constructive soul explicit from the outside.
The use of wood, the best known of the renewable natural materials, is the most consistent dress of a school where a generation of children grow up with an educational project where environmental sustainability and the circular economy are essential.
The school will appear as a large musical instrument, a lute that exhibits bands of precious wood on the outside and on the inside, as in a sound box, the simplest multilayer panel.

The already excellent thermal and acoustic insulation of the wood will be further increased by means of a thermal coat positioned between the X-LAM walls and the wooden staved facade, in order to achieve the highest thermohygrometric standards.

The windows frames are made of wood with external coating in anthracite anodized aluminum and are fitted with triple double glazing. To guarantee an adjustable solar shading, up to perfect darkening, an electric aluminum venetian blind is mounted on the outer edge of the window.
The large flat roof can accommodate a considerable amount of photovoltaic panels, making the energy balance of the building nearly positive.