New State Primary School of Volpago del Montello

Treviso, Italy

Competition 2007

New Building

The design and planning of the new school starts from the observation of the presence of some characteristic and determining aspects in the area: the pipelines and the power line, which impose constraints and limits, cause disturbance and demand attention and protection. The need for bands of respect, as well as being a limit, has thus become the opportunity to combine different spaces, connoting them in an original and effective way. The project therefore takes the east-west direction and accentuates it strongly, symbolically and materially reiterating the need for protection from the power line; the wall, declined as an embankment and as the northern front of the school, becomes the interpreter of this foundation. The school organizes itself beyond this semantic element, and the north facade presents itself as a barrier to protect the didactic spaces; the classrooms, where the pupils stay longer, open up towards the south and organize an intimate and protected outdoor green space.