Schools

MBO Nimeto is a vocational school for ‘creative space makers’, offering courses in painting, restoration, styling & presentation, sign making and the like. Its building is made up of two custom-designed vocational schools built around 1970; one was originally designed for the National Painters School, the other for the Netherlands Butchers School. They were connected by later additions, though a street separates them. Due to its many alterations over fifty years, the building’s layout had become unbalanced and suboptimal for Nimeto’s educational philosophy. Meanwhile, a growing number of students and new insights necessitated a thorough transformation.

Context – In Kolkata, India, the existing basketball courts of ‘Modern High School for Girls’ have been transformed into a 6-storey co-ed international school. Situated at a noisy and congested traffic intersection, the building’s massing begins as a rectangular block with long elevations north/south and short elevations east/west. The choice of a north-south longitudinal orientation with east-west as the short frontage aims to maximize natural daylight in south-facing classrooms year-round and provides an elevated panoramic view of a recreational lawn and the broader cityscape of Kolkata.

A Communal Epicenter for Learning. Learning and Community. The new school at Amager in Copenhagen is an open and inviting house, where every inch of the architecture offers spaces for learning. A central feature of the school is the leisure zone, which we have weaved into the fabric of the city by letting the school’s architecture melt with the surrounding area. The zone has multiple functions that invite by-passers to interact with the school. Towards the street, we have designed the building as community architecture with large staircases that function as both seating plateaus and workout spaces.

A century-old primary school in a thousand-year-old city. Dongguan Guancheng has been connected with the Dongjiang River since ancient times, and the city and its water veins are intertwined. The name of Ruan Chong Primary School is related to “water flow”. In the past, ships even passed by the school gate, and several local family temples used to serve as teaching spaces. The school’s 2023 renovation coincides with the city’s key project “Dongguan Memory”, as the thousand-year-old city faces difficulties and opportunities to rethink urban revitalization. Ruan Yong Primary School is the oldest primary school still in place in Dongguan City. Its renewal logic is divided into two parts: the street area and the campus area, and are promoted by enterprises and the government respectively. We were responsible for the unified planning and deployment of the project, and this time we focused on transforming the space along the street.

The special schools in Salzwedel have been complemented by the construction of a single-field sports hall. The sports hall is located as a common link between two existing school buildings on the campus. In addition to sports activities, it serves as a multifunctional space for other school and municipal events. The architectural concept conveys the multifunctional requirements, including for festive events, to the outside.

This multisport pavilion and its outdoor spaces are located in Avenida de la Ilustración, Madrid, camouflaged between the asphalt and the vegetation, surrounded by trees that cast organic shadows on its façades. A simple but complete building, well accomplished. Located southwest of the existing school plot, the proposal was developed around two key concepts. Maximize the use of the school’s outdoors, using the volume of the pavilion to reconfigure and improve the access to all the facilities.

Commencing its operations in September 2023, Daguan Primary School (Xiangfu Branch) is a significant component of the Xiangfu Bridge Historic District Renewal initiative in Gongshu District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province. The school was constructed under the EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) general contracting framework, with GOA’s significant involvement in every stage, from conceptualization to implementation. “The design of educational architecture should go beyond basic functionality, with the space acting as a dynamic medium for rich behaviors, establishing an environment that encourages spontaneous exploration.” ZHANG Xun, Lead Architect, Senior Principal of GOA.