The idea of the ‘Community School’ came from Sweden. There, it is a place children go to and where they receive lessons, alternated with play. The day is not divided according to the traditional schedule. Some of the pupils are taught in the mornings, while other children are playing. And vice versa. The result is a kind of village in which teaching and play are divided over the day as in normal life. Apart from being a school, the village is a playground as well. In fact, this type of school is best characterised as a hybrid.
In the Netherlands, Community Schools are often used to bring children from diverse cultural backgrounds into contact. More and more parents have children when they are older and regard their children as little princes or princesses, with all its consequences. Rather than being part of large families, as in the past, children are more often than not at home alone or with one other sibling, living in their own cultural capsules. The Community School is a means of ensuring that such children meet ‘other children’, that is, children whose positions in life are different. Community Schools may also be regarded as special spaces, in which all children and parents may jointly be seen as forming an experimental garden for society at large, in other words, a kind of pressure cooker. Relationships that occur less and less frequently in society are cultivated in the microcosm of the Community School.
The original programme of requirements was a combination of entities, comprising a traditional and a Montessori-based primary school, a day nursery, a playgroup, a community centre with social amenities, a sports centre and a youth welfare centre. One of the challenges we faced was to find out whether the interspace could be used by creating clever dual functions. One cluster of functions found its place around the entrance, comprising a bar, a meeting room, a winter garden, a gymnasium and an extracurricular centre, all in one place. We tried to find ways of saving space by having different users occupy the same spaces at different times. By dividing the building up as effectively as possible we even had spare space for a winter garden with plants and trees.
Initially, we looked for a campus-type model, with separate pavilions. However, that proved infeasible. There were insufficient funds for all the additional facades, stairwells and cloakrooms that would be required. We therefore opted for the opposite approach: as wide a building as possible, with a minimum of facade, stairwells and cloakrooms. Less facade is not only advantageous in terms of building costs, but also in terms of energy management. A number of playgrounds were situated on the roof, providing a saving in land costs and, in addition, obviating the need for fencing. As a result the school grounds became part of an adjacent park.
A Community School should not look like a large school. Children spend twelve years of their lives at school, and there is more to those lives than education alone. In this light, the idea of a spaceship was developed. Spaceships play a prominent part in children’s visual imagination. In this case the spaceship would play the part of a galactic Noah’s Ark, accommodating an entire children’s village, with all its different spaces. The spaceship would be bound on a voyage lasting many years and the children would have to survive for generations, breeding animals and growing plants. This idea remained our source of inspiration. It even led to the construction of a large enclosed garden. The spaceship itself would appeal to the world of games, films and exciting stories.
The building is directly connected to the children’s game culture. It is more fun to enter a rocket than go to school. This is certainly the case if the rocket has made an emergency landing in your neighbourhood and its lowered flightstairs are reminiscent of the headlong evacuation of aliens. Judging by its exterior, the rocket has been through many adventures. Maybe it will suddenly take off tomorrow, just like that.
Designing is partly a matter of staging. A decor of daily life is constructed but need not always be constructed in material form. Staging allows one to intervene in the virtual space of the image culture. Designs are not only about how space works in terms of volume, but also about how it works on the surface and what impressions are created. The present building is not marked by just a single characteristic. On the contrary, it is capable of assuming many different characters. It is interactive and based on traditional features, involving spaces, relieved surfaces, light, patterns and colours.
The interior of the building was designed in as many varied forms as possible. The children’s places are on different scales, sometimes intimate and safe, at other times large and adventurous, just as in the ‘real’ world. Differently coloured planes are applied in the rooms, allowing the occupants to make up stories on the basis of the patterns. In fact, colours and patterns are not used to explain the building but to allow for new interpretations.
