The project is designed to respect the typical mountainous village setting, surrounded by public facilities. The project is designed to densify the community, while enhancing the image of the school as an essential village building, a metonymic image of the public and social role it plays. Its presence is therefore strengthened, to affirm the identity it must express within the village.
To address the relationship between the main road and the schoolyard, public spaces are given priority, offering a progressive pathway that manages transitions on the scale of the site and its topography, but also pedestrian circulation on the scale of the commune, by linking the footpath at the top to the public park at the bottom of the village. Voids are articulated to create a presence of volumes on the street, as well as a clearance that ensures children’s safety from the moment they arrive.

The external layout is defined by a cut-out volumetry that blends contemporarily into the built and landscaped context. Blending into the topography, the buildings work with each other to manage scale and height relationships. The project proposes shifts between volumes, frictions that enliven the school courtyard and lift the built mass.
The school, located on the sports hall, unifies the school program and resolves the objective of building in successive stages. The glides, governed by a clear concrete structural grid, organize functional circulations that respond to a distribution highlighting the modular quality of the project. The wooden exterior skin contributes to the building’s identity.

In the school, the distribution of spaces guarantees the quality of the interior ambience, creating a special relationship with the courtyard and the extra-curricular activities. The sports hall is directly linked to the nearby park, providing a view of the valley landscape.
Last but not least, the complementary housing program, of a mineral nature, is inserted close to the school building, in line with the frontage of the cantonal street, so as to provide a dense response to the village context and to enhance and reinforce the emptiness of the communal building square.

Translated with DeepL.com