La Scuola delle domande

The project promotes an educational system capable of combining the rites and symbols of the great Italian educational tradition with the acquisition of
a greater social recognition of the school, declined in the Sicilian territorial area.
The child’s action is linked to the theme of training, or education as a construction of the citizen. The student, along a structured path made up of gradual levels of conscious conquest of freedom, becomes the adolescent aware of what is the intersubjectivity, its role in society, the relationship with the community.
This path, which is reflected in the articulation of the project, starts from a form of proximity to nature and comes to the approach to the community and therefore, physically and culturally, to the city.
The building is imagined as an urban structure on the scale of the child and adolescent: not a city in miniature, but a system of interconnected spaces, determined and casual crossings, places of freedom and respect for others, of meeting and introspection.
This idea of ​​architectural urbanity is expressed through the elements that make up the Scholastic Pole, declined in the relationship with Nature and the Community. The complex is structured along an axis belonging to the city, a stoà bent towards the south-west intersection of Via Venere: an invitation to enter, a declaration of openness and the crossing of the scholastic world by the community. On the opposite side, the stoà looks towards Monte Pellegrino, dialoguing with the city in the variation of the depths and the heights of the functions.
This new urban figure connects and brings together the volumes of the complex: the single-level block of primary school and the two-level building of the secondary school; on the other side, the circular ribbon of the school for children, the gym and the prism of the Great Hall that opens to the city.
The buildings are thus assembled in a village of education, characterized by a clear and simple separation of accesses and routes between the three different schools and the parts for promiscuous use.
Each of the bodies intended for teaching has a strong geometric characterization, in order to guarantee a clear perceptive impression associated with an identifiable figure.
In the School of Questions the architectural type evolves hand in hand with the growth of the child from the most collected configuration of the kindergarten, to the semi-open one of the primary, ending with an organism fully extended towards the outside world in the secondary building. Spaces are organized in such a way that the pupils can feel witness to a process of development of their formative process in which past, present and future are coexisting times.