DKA Daphne Karaiskaki Architecture . photos: © Rasmus Norlander
The project was born with a very simple, almost childish, gesture: the throw of a pair of dice on a board. One dice was a secondary school, the other a kindergarten. The board was a public area occupied by other school buildings (a primary school and a sports’ hall), lacking coherence and definition: it was neither a school campus, nor a public space embraced and used by the people. It was, nonetheless the only public space that the village of Courrendlin in rural Jura possessed having the capacity to host all community activity (gatherings, fairs, all types of manifestations). The first of the two dice, the secondary school, was completed in November 2023. The second is yet to come.
The design of the building was all about its relationship to the natural slope and the use of the school staircase as the main component generating space. The aspiration was to excavate as little as possible and save energy and means. The ground floor was split into two levels sitting on the natural terrain. The “split” ground floor gesture was repeated three times in section, thus creating an interior spiral where all floors became part of one single space.
A staircase is one of a school’s most important components. In most typologies (collective housing, office buildings and more) the elevator is the basic vertical circulation device. Not in schools. In this case, the staircase becomes the school and the school becomes the staircase: the split levels become landings of a huge ascending helix offering multiple possibilities of activity and interaction. The construction and materialization of the building is all about context and economy, insofar as economy goes back to its original meaning in the Greek language : administration of ‘the house,’ and consequently, administration of resources. A quarry and a forest were the resources available literally on the edges of the village. The concrete that was casted came from the neighboring grounds and the wooden beams used for the floors and roof were offered by the community.
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KINDERGARDEN CHATS, SCHOOL IN JURA, SWITZERLAND *
* Kindergarten Chats: essay written by Louis Sullivan in 1901 in the form of a conversation between teacher and student
