Schools Without Classrooms Berlin Competition: The Wedge
COMPETITION BRIEF
Archasm, an online international architectural competition website, in the Design Without Classrooms: Berlin competition seeks the creation of a middle school (age group 5-12) that is a departure from the traditional rigid, static and boring built environment of a school and move towards versatile and flexible learning spaces that allow reuse for any possible purpose. The architecture competition seeks to create an inter-generational learning space with a very informal and fun appeal to it. The school should give more importance to personal interests and aspirations of the students, while maintaining academic rigor. The participants should design landscaped collaborative zones as a part of the schooling-built environment and not separate chunks of vast green spaces.
JURY
Archasm selected a competition jury comprised of renowned and eminent personalities from the field of architecture and design.
RECOGNITION
Top 50 out of 400+ entries. View the Top 50 competition entries (The Wedge is second from the left in the top row of competition boards)
DESIGN BRIEF
Design Team: Bingyu Guan, Daniel Jencks, Albert McDonald, Ryan Oldach, Gabriela Orizondo, Nick Vaughn, Alec Yuzhbabenko
The school building typology has fallen into the “one size fits all” mentality with a mundane routine of teaching and learning in a table – bench – chalkboard environment. Design can provide an environment that encourages mental growth through a student’s ideal way of learning by catering to each of the four types of learners. This shifted approach to the existing pedagogy can be achieved by breaking the physical and metaphorical boundaries into smaller, versatile and dynamic components. Allowing students to interact in environments best suited to their learning style, encourages stronger mental and physical development.
Interior and exterior spaces with strong visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic qualities, will strengthen the individual and collective capabilities of students in the school.
Integrating small elements such as adjustable learning pods, interactive walls, and retractable forum steps, enhance the learning qualities by introducing experiences in a smaller scale.
In conjunction, all these elements aim to define a new and improved approach to an archaic pedagogy.
