Schools

A square with a triangular top hat sure does make a home. A similar approach has been taken in sketching this school. Built like a toy house, the massing has been designed with certain innocence in its rather rudimentary shapes and geometries. Entire forms of playful construction in projected cantilevers with recessed windows make the elevation of the school block. 

1. Children’s Home. Haibei Kindergarten, less than 2 kilometers from Qianhai Bay, is nestled within a densely populated area with a mix of architectural styles.  It was built around 2010 alongside residential buildings, located on a triangular piece of land on the southern edge, and features an L-shaped layout. We have reinterpreted the original institutional layout as a “home” shape, establishing the relationship between “living quarters” and “living room” through the organization of geometric forms. On this foundation, we reshaped the porch and garden to enhance spatial fluidity and comfort.

Sille is a village located 8 km northwest of Konya city center with a population of 4,000. Its history dates back to the Neolithic era and witnessed periods of Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman rule. In the late 1900s, Sille was a bustling town with a population of around 18,000, half of whom were non-Muslims, mainly Greeks and Ottomans.

Founded in 1955, Nyckelviksskolan on Lidingö provides pre-university courses in art, crafts, architecture, and design and vocational training for craft educators. When the need for expanded and more appropriate premises arose, Marge Arkitekter was tasked with designing an extension that would primarily house the ceramic and sculpture workshops.

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.