Renewal of learning places. The improvement of the common spaces of the Public Schools

The research involves enhanced use of public school buildings and open spaces. Improvements to school spaces and renewal of learning places will be made through small, dedicated architectural projects. Regeneration projects will take schools’ open and common spaces as their starting point. The modification process will examine the requirements of experimental teaching, evaluate the needs of the scholastic community and observe the specific physical condition of the school structures included in the research. The research, with the collaboration of an inter-disciplinary team, aims to propose guidelines for a change to existing culture within public schools. We intend to promote processes whereby schools are opened to associations undertaking socially relevant programmes, such as parents’ organizations and non-profit organizations. We aim to start processes for the re-use and regeneration of the many abandoned spaces inside schools. We wish to promote updated teaching systems using new innovative models. The main theme of this research is to give physical shape to the Community’s sense of belonging to the school, and to re-define a reciprocal relationship between the school and all those who live in it. A project of architecture which can give a recognizable identity to anonymous spaces. A project that aims to offer new future and achievable perspectives for improvement to locations where social criticalities, nihilism, exclusion, marginalization, and sometimes violence, seem to prevail. The care for spaces, gardens, trees, new play-grounds, canteens, atrium, will reconfigure weak areas as areas in which new shared values are shown. An essential aspect of the architectural project includes the revision of technical components related to shading/sunny spaces, healthiness, security and energy efficiency. The scholastic heritage is re-designed in a qualitative sense through a new process of signifying and regenerating the common spaces by minimal interventions, allowing to work step by step