Collaboration with Jordan Valdina, PE of Synergy Design
Building Type: School complex
Status: Competition Entry, “Innovative Bioclimatic European School Complex in Greece”
Site: Crete, Greece
Year: 2012
This design for the proposed kindergarten through secondary level Innovative Bioclimatic European School Complex is one elliptical building in plan, with separate yet connected sections to serve each of the schools and central administration. In the middle lies an open courtyard in which outdoor classroom learning, recreation, and appreciation of nature and design features all may take place, along with ecological water treatment (EcoCyclET TM) and geothermal systems.
The open and interconnected plan, in stepped and cantilevered levels with high efficiency glazed surfaces and openings throughout as well as open but sheltered areas within the building structure, affords ample day-lighting, views, selective shading and solar gain, and the form and means for comprehensive passive ventilation and cooling.
ÆCO School II is to embody the new return and integration of our expansive, evolving self and world with the natural energy flows and systems around us. In this, as a building and site it is to be a living vehicle of the students’ education. ÆCO School I™ is a concept that expresses, as context and reference, where we come from and what we as humanity originally formed in our initial forging of civilization, of necessity variously in concert with nature and optimizing her energy and forces to enable our move forward. The labyrinth of our developed minds now has come to trap or liberate us from the aspect of ourselves that has wrought substantial and even critical ecological disruption, ironically as an inverse effect of our very progression. While immeasurably transformed through the paths of our own history, we now can be said to be back where we started, thus contending with our own nature, compelled of necessity as well as inspiration, once again to evolve a new integration with ourselves and world. And how prime a vehicle for this pivotal motion is the design and construction of the bioclimatic multi-cultural multi-national school in Crete, Greece, at the edge of Europe. This is ÆCO School IITM.
An exterior, and at places interior, structural grid system (MV EXO-GRIDTM) enables addition and removal of various kinds of panels on this grid, to be chosen and located per the real time priorities of the building and its occupants, such as photovoltaic, solar thermal, planted, wind control and shading types, from partial cover to full opaque panels.
The central open circular court is also where nature is at once presented, engaged and honored within the surrounding yet open building form. Plants and fitting subsurface systems are specified in this area to “grow away” wastewater, transforming past waste into future resource and directly evidencing the ecological cycle as integral with the processes of the school.
The total building and site composition, including bi-directional three-dimensionally spiraling pedestrian, visual and water elements, in addition to the stated measures and figures, craft a unified yet diverse and interactive whole, inspiring creativity and supporting optimal learning and growth for a multi-cultural, multi-national student body.