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Ponzano Primary School: A ‘Society Building’

Ponzano Primary School (PPS) is designed for 375 children aged from 6 to 10. It houses 15 classrooms and special spaces for art, music, computing, language and science; and a gymnasium, a canteen and a library.

The search for medium-scale, but heightened interventions in the territory of 'the sprawl', of which Ponzano is part, brought attention to the need to investigate the role of school buildings in contemporary settings. School buildings are a matter of interest for a number of different reasons:

- they are small and have a character of dispersion: they follow the logic of sprawl, but their presence is compulsory in the community;

- their program looks very specific, but instead is open, as the building is used for only part of the day. If well-designed, some spaces could be activated by the community after school hours;

- schools are spaces where a multi-cultural experience is compulsory and happens naturally;

- they are familiar, small scale, easily accessible buildings and they are 'coloured knots' in the grey city of dispersion;

- they are usually low-budget buildings.

PPS constitutes a new node, a ‘society building’, a meeting place for the whole community. Part of the building (the gymnasium and some of the classrooms) is, in fact, accessible after school hours.

We focused on collective spaces: firstly, in the general outline, all spaces are gathered around a central square, with a memory of monastic cloisters, as places of knowledge preservation. Then, in section, all the spaces face each other and are reflected by the transparent and coloured walls: Intervisibility favours the exchanging of knowledge, experience and socialization.

The school becomes a ‘society building’, a space of possible multiethnic exchange and comparison. It becomes a threshold, a place to keep together a landscape of memory and the landscape of the contemporary.