Identity and Multiplicity in School Buildings' Design

In the field of architectural design, the topic individual buildings and building types is strictly linked with the double subject identity/multiplicity, a research on pertinence and progressive clarification of an architectural theme developed in a particular place. In this sense, thinking about the project of school buildings means to work on a theme of urban architecture highly consolidated and topical at the same time, in which the school building is interpreted as a public building for excellence. This need emerged clearly during the first decade of the 2000s, a period during which an international line of reasoning on the need to come back to work on the schools as sites for architectural experimentation and to bring the size of this issue to the scale of the city began to develop. In this perspective, starting from the comparison between identity and multiplicity, we intend to work on two parallel fronts: under the general theoretical profile, on how the individual school building reacts to the contemporary urban condition and on how, in relation to a specific urban situation, you can configure a variation of its building type. This second aspect will be detailed starting from our project for a new school in Piano di Sorrento, near Naples in Italy. The definition of the overall composition, starting from the design of an intermediate form of open spaces, the modular spatiality of the individual classrooms, the urban character of auditorium, gym, library and dining hall, to the new perspectives of the connective tissue as a learning landscape, have been investigated in an integrated way, with the aim of establishing innovative school architecture, unitary and complete, integrated with balance in the delicate landscape of the Sorrento's peninsula.