Bellavitis Middle School – Studio Ricatti
Schools are the embodiement of the way our modern society passes on information, and Italian architects Studio Ricatti have designed the Bellavitis Middle School in Vicenza, Italy to help educate the next generation. The school has been designed to foster a relationship between the internal educational spaces, and the outside. The architects created an outside courtyard that forms a central point for the schools community to identify with.
The architecture itself is bold and simple. Strong lines dictate the aesthetic language of the built landscape proposed here, with touches of colour bringing life to expansive walls. The assured architectural language of the school buildings will no doubt harbour a commitment to focus and excellence within, and its understated form will do little to detract from the academic aims of the school, but will encourage an open and fresh approach to learning, contained within its walls, influenced by its architecture.
“Building a school pretends always a reflection on the relationship between institution and the city. This is still valid when the institution is a simple secondary school and the city is a small center in the province of Vicenza, with its low rise construction scattered on the territory.
The relation with the context, in these cases, can not be a simple matter of alignments, rather it is a question of roles, a problem of what there is inside and what there is outside the limits proposed by the project.
For this reason we decided first to establish an “inside”: the interior of a courtyard around which the community gather to teach and to be educated.
Then, we worked on the elements that define it: the classrooms on the west side, on the southern one the secretariat and a multipurpose space, similar to that hosted in the northern volume, which rises from the ground to mark the entrance.
Finally the gym which, on the contrary, collapses a bit in the ground, to make visible again the roof of the houses just left by the kids and that will be reached again during the afternoon”, Studio Ricatti
