New "Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa" Nursery School
The MIUR (the Ministry of Education), with decree n. 624/2017, allocated funds to the City of Folignano for the construction of school modules to host the activities of the Piane di Morro nursery school, allowing the demolition and reconstruction of the existing school complex. This became necessary after the seismic events of 2016. The project was designed as quickly as the emergency required, while the execution took a little longer due to the pandemic in 2020. The completion of the works is considered a major achievement and a new opportunity for the entire community.
PLANNING AND SHAPES
The new kindergarten is situated near the recently built primary school in Folignano. The original orography of the site, located to the south of the city centre, was characterised by a pronounced slope and was almost entirely undeveloped, as it was an expansion area aimed to host public school-type services. This newly urbanised area has thus become a reference point for the citizenship, a pole acting as a filter between the consolidated urban fabric and the natural reality of the hilly landscape. The total area/volume of the intervention is approx. 548 square metres / 1.905 cubic meter.
The school consists basically of a single volume that interacts with a very complex existing plano-altimetric situation, with slopes between 10 and 30%. As a result of the levelling of the area, and the creation of green spaces necessary for the correct performance of pedagogical activities, the building is located in the east wing of the lot, in order to achieve a balance between earthworks and backfills.
The volume is fragmented towards the street front, breaking up the typical strictness of the main facades, and inviting the pedestrian to get closer to the entrance. The porticoes are different in their finish and permeability to light: we see an alternation of semi-transparent polycarbonate surfaces and metal sunshades, and coloured enclosures ending in full-height external cladding panels, with circular perforations inside them. As a result, a high degree of spatial and visual variability is achieved, which intrigues the user and provides an interesting approach to the building.
The height of the external facade is about 4.00 m; the building has a double-pitch roof with a pitch orthogonal to the street front and a slope of 5%.
ACCESSIBLE BUILDING
The school has three different entrances:
- Main pedestrian access, which is located on the main front of the building, the South front. It provides the direct communication between the inside and the outside with a green filter. The surface of the facade is predominantly glazed and highly permeable, a trait also repeated for the coloured perforated panels of the porticoes. When visitors enter the building, walking along the external ramp and crossing the entrance canopy, they can go directly to the classrooms crossing the entrance hall / multifunctional area. The ramp is accessible through a widening of the sidewalk, which is extended following the natural orography of the site. A ramp with an 8% gradient then extends to the area in front of the entrance.
- Vehicular access, which is located on the South front and close to the pedestrian walkway. This is an option which is reserved for specific users, like the carers of people with disabilities and the loading/unloading of goods and services. It has two parking stalls, which makes it a small area with low impact/risk for the building's young users. There is a direct access from the car park to the building's portico, through a pedestrian gate, which leads the user to the entrance in total safety. The maintenance access, which takes place from outside, to the rear of the building.
LAYOUT
The layout has been carefully reviewed and shared with the client, in a participative design process supported by Gruppo Marche's Quality Management tools and an innovative design based on BIM (Building Information Modeling).
The design observes the requirements for accessibility, hygiene and fire prevention.
There are three group rooms at the school, each with 20 students per class, and there is also a multifunctional room and a dining hall that can hold 60 children at the same time.
The central connector serves as a buffer zone between the children’s activities and the service spaces, including the assistant room, which has a toilet and dressing room, the infirmary, laundry, storage, and the kitchen, which is also equipped with a toilet, dressing room, and storage, all of which are duly separated. In particular:
- Multifunctional room / Piazza. The entrance to the building, the Square, in the kindergarten school, is the centre of the school community's meetings and celebrations, represents its most important symbolic element and is also the reference point for the distribution of the entire building. The Square is therefore the heart of the building. It is the distribution hub and the main aggregation point of the interaction, where most of the exchanges take place outside the Home base. The application of this concept is one of the basic guidelines of the MIUR (2013), which looks at international education spaces in their multi-functional and multi-disciplinary vocation. Not only short meetings, but assemblies, informal lectures, screenings, and much more, within a single space designed to be the setting for different daily activities. It is a welcoming space, both in aesthetic, physical and sensory terms. It is accessible through a filter in order to comply with energy-saving directives. It is equipped with all the facilities for multi-functionality as well as a dedicated toilet. The walls are decorated with coloured bands, also recalled in other areas of the building such as the dining hall, and equipped with blackboard wall surfaces, to maximise child-building interaction and enhance teaching activities.
- Group rooms. The distribution of the building is single-storey in order to maximise the interaction with nature: the beautiful context encourages a development of the space in this direction. This is the home base to which the child refers during his/her time at school. The locations for activity are therefore different and manifold, flanking the function of the classroom with equal importance: the “piazza”, the dining hall, the practical activities of personal hygiene and tidying up, the outdoor classrooms and the regular classrooms become one unit, expanding the concept of learning. At the same time, the classroom is equipped with strategic elements that allow it to be flexible according to the activity. A sliding wall is placed between different sections to unite the rooms for shared use. Each section is identified by a colour, in order to make it clear to the user, once he/she has entered the central corridor, which room he or she should go to. The circle theme, which characterises the facades, is taken up with the PVC floor coverings in the entrance of the classrooms. Inside the sections, the circular theme returns with the modelling of the acoustic ceilings in mineralised wood fibre, and the round pendant lamps. The section consists of: a changing area at the entrance, with coat hooks and shoe rests; a large toilet equipped with an interior window to improve teacher’s control; a large activity area divided into sub-zones through colour differentiation of the PVC flooring. The furniture is modern and flexible.
- External arrangements. In its horizontal and vertical development, the project defines several types of open spaces: a play area in front of the classrooms, which is the south courtyard; a children's garden next to the dining hall; green areas that are not available for use. Privacy is provided through the introduction of hedges around the perimeter of the lot. The accessibility of the outdoor space is guaranteed by a system of perimeter roof canopies, consisting of coloured portals alternating with semi-permeable polycarbonate surfaces, on a steel support structure.
TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
An aseismic structure building (Use Class IV) was developed according to Italian regulation “NTC 2018”. The building also incorporates NZeb (Near Zero Energy Building) energy characteristics, which ensures that young users can enjoy a safe and highly technological structure, according to the most modern principles of education. In detail:
- Structures. Due to the nature of the building, a nursery school on a single floor, the design is focused on the highest environmental sustainability of the building, which is the reason why the X-Lam load-bearing structure was chosen. In order to avoid the water threat, the design applied various executive strategies: detachment between the slab (on piles) and the X-Lam partitions by raising them with reinforced concrete curbs suitably sheathed in order to eliminate rising damp; use of 100% waterproof insulation for the first metre above ground level; use of 5% sloping roofing with double standing seam sheet metal cladding and draining joint, after applying sheathing. The construction involved the partial levelling of the ground, and the consequent connection between the laying surface and the contour lines. For this purpose, structural works were realised such as: a bulkhead of posts at the back of the building, covered with prefabricated panels and grafted into the natural slope in order to reduce the final impact; reinforced soil towards the street front to define the garden for school activities.
- Systems. The project is designed to be energy neutral in compliance with the 2017 Minimum Environmental Criteria. The design provides the installation of a condensing heat pump to cover the energy needs for heating the entire building; the terminals of the heating system consist of underfloor radiant panels, as the presence of a warm surface is the ideal solution for a facility that hosts young children, who spend most of their educational activities sitting on the floor and moving without shoes. Regarding sanitary hot water requirements, a high-efficiency thermodynamic (heat pump) boiler was installed. In order to ensure the VMC, a double-wall, high-efficiency cross-flow recuperator is installed, which guarantees the legal air changes for the group rooms, the supply room, the dining area, the staff room and the infirmary, as well as the extraction of air in the corridors, storage rooms, laundry and toilets. Being an originally virgin soil, it was also necessary not to modify the water permeability; in order to do this, a rainwater collection tank was placed below the west play area. In order to save energy, the building is also equipped with DALI lighting controlled by brightness sensors, PVC window frames with low-emission glass.
