The program dedicated to the public school's theme is creating a "common ground" between Public Administration and students in Architecture (Politecnico di Milano) with teachers and tutors. We are exploring innovative scenarios of the complex system of schools and educational spaces. The possibility of working in a coordinated way on 24 case studies agreed with the School Building Department of the Municipality of Milan constitutes an opportunity for a research by design applied to real cases.
Cross-border/international
Italy
Other
Master in Sustainable Architecture and Landscape Design work with International students, UE and extra UE like Egypt, China, Turkey, Mexico, Ecuador, Indonesia, Brasil,Germany, Iran
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Municipality of Milan, School Building Department and ViceDean
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Polythecnic of Milan - dABC Department Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Elvio Last name of representative: MANGANARO Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Assistant Professor in Architecture and Urban Design Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: via Ponzio 31 Town: Milan Postal code: 20133 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 347 0958975 E-mail:elvio.manganaro@polimi.it Website:https://www.dabc.polimi.it/persona/elvio-manganaro/
Inventing Schools is an experimental project that is part of a fruitful collaboration between the Municipality of Milan and the School of Architecture Urban Planning Construction Engineering of the Milan Polytechnic University. The purpose is to respond to a twofold need: on the one hand, that of the Milan Administration to build and verify hypotheses for the transformation of the city, with attention to urgent issues and critical urban situations; on the other, to identify for the student's opportunities for design experimentation dropped into reality and forced into a close relationship with the network of subjects and interlocutors who operate in the transformation of the built environment.
The 'Inventing Schools' experience focuses on the theme of schools. Schools' strategic role in a country's development potential is widely recognized. Yet, this awareness has rarely been matched by adequate design attention, neither concerning updating educational and pedagogical models, stressed and challenged by the continuous acceleration of our society's, nor concerning updating the existing building stock. In this regard, the more than 42,000 school buildings that guest around 8 million students in our country need to be more resilient to processes of obsolescence.
The resources made available as part of our country's European Next Generation recovery project for structural investments are now a promising opportunity to intervene in this heritage. But again, the availability of resources is a necessary but insufficient condition. In this sense, through the search for a close contact between architectural and pedagogical instances, Inventing Schools aimed to initiate a reflection on the culturally grounded and design-open school, oriented to focus on new ideas to transform the availability of resources into a concrete opportunity to build a better school than the current one. And for all of us to invent the school of tomorrow is an ethical duty.
Space as a third educator
Design of School buildings
Regeneration of existing school buildings
Open learning spaces
Sustainable School Architecture
The dialogue between actions of artificialization of space and the natural environment, in full awareness of the alteration of ecological-environmental systems, tends decisively towards the search for new balances. In every order and degree, the school sphere needs to absorb this careful look to propose a relationship between human actions and their effects on the environment as accomplices and participants in transformative strategies. Updating and accountability for environmental issues involve the existing heritage and the culture of the project. In giving shape to innovative educational landscapes, the new ways of living space cannot avoid including the sense of belonging to nature and the environmental context in every transformation action. Nature and architecture, accomplices, can reveal mutual resonances and correspondences in their forms. In this perspective, the UN 2030 Agenda places quality education for all at the centre of Goal 4 and emphasizes how adequate school facilities and suitable learning environments are the preconditions for any hypothesis of sustainable development. The contemporary paradigms connected to the ecological and environmental components in the modern city are updated to understand the multiple configurations of the scholastic inhabited spaces. The architectural design feeds on existing conditions, historical components on different scales, and morphological, typological and social characteristics. The research crosses different scales, times and fields and deals with new shapes in space. Bioclimatic attention in sustainable architectural design involves maximizing renewable resources and containing consumption and polluting emissions. The architectural design optimizes the intervention with its physical environmental conditions: with the site through correct management of local natural resources. Working with the public buildings, we will try to control the energy performances working towards N’ ZEB, near Zero Energy Building.
Imagining schools within a school of architecture: as in the presence of a game of mirrors, imagining schools within a school of architecture inevitably brings the discourse on architecture pedagogy. The child's and architect's training meet at a point that Froebel holds together to those who were the most radical and seminal teaching experiences of architecture, Bauhaus and Vchutemas on all. The competition between these two moments in constructing the language of modernity is a fact. That's why the school theme questions our discipline so profoundly, and the work done and the work we will do, is precious, even beyond the contingency of the program.
University research and innovative teaching methods constitute interconnected spheres of work that mutually feed and contaminate each other. The design experience on the renewal of learning spaces, the idea of the school as a common contemporary space, between architecture and landscape, with the stimulus to internationalisation and social integration, through inclusion policies, is undoubtedly a phenomenon in progress at all school levels.
Finally, the school building incorporates an acceptable level of complexity because it relates to the public sphere and promotes identification. Every student has got first-hand knowledge of the environment associated with the different school orders and grades. It is a habit that facilitates understanding of the issues involved. Still, more importantly, it nurtures inductive inference, that is, the logical procedure of abstracting from observation of detail to derive notions of general validity.
We are therefore certain of this: reality is an aspect of an architect's training.
We believe that students are agents of change. It means that students of all levels and degree are a reservoir of energy, basin of resources and source of ideas and perspectives. They are the actors of change. For this reason, involving local communities, observing and listening to their needs is the first step in starting effective planning.
The work conducted in the context of Inventing Schools, together with some other research placed in other Metropolitan Areas, searches for correspondences and reciprocity between pedagogy and architecture. The search for specific relationships between the actions and reactions of actors capable of expressing different points of view stimulates innovative teaching methods. At the same time, developing projects or micro-projects to renew spaces allows for the physical shape of creative spaces. In some cases, it was possible to involve local communities and pupils from each school directly within the program.
The attention to architectural research Inventing Schools program appears even more necessary following the introduction of digital teaching. Some children, pupils and students find it difficult to place themselves in a social, relational dimension in the presence and find it challenging to work in groups. The program aims to activate design and transformative processes capable of connoting a physical-relational context in which everyone's educational and cognitive functions develop.
Virtual and telematics strongly weaken a physical-relational context. Space, therefore, cannot be conceived in the abstract, regardless of the flow of relationships that take shape within it. As Tim Ingold recently wrote, there is no study of the human being that can be detached from the natural environment in which it is inserted. Inventing Schools deals with physical spaces, existing schools, and future schools, with a better balance between analogical and digital components.
The relationships with the health emergency and its consequences on the school organization and the need to explore scenarios of different ways of using and reusing spaces also made it necessary to identify the current weaknesses in the various school types. Therefore, although the restrictions affected 2020/2022, the schools wanted to place themselves as an open and dialoguing place with local realities and the territory. The scenarios designed and still developed through master theses, workshops, scientific research and laboratories work on a school that interacts with the context and whose presence and vitality go beyond the school perimeter involving the neighbourhood and the city.
The idea of an open and widespread school aimed at integrating school activities with urban spaces and the regeneration project involved the context of formal and strict school spaces, such as classrooms, laboratories, libraries, canteens and non-formal areas. They were characterized by more direct and impromptu relationships, such as the atrium, the garden, the courtyard, the public park, the playing field, the street and the square. With a co-design process, exchanges have been activated between students of different grades and school orders, producing new scenarios. The meetings have given shape to a further essential correspondence: the school as a recognizable place in the urban fabric, with identity and recognition, and an updated centre of reference for the community.
Moreover, the school building is conceived with the ambition of opening up to the community and playing, after hours, the role of a small neighborhood civic center. In this perspective, it is connoted as a cornerstone of urbanity within the piece of the city in which it is inserted, and the architecture has the task of suitably representing this circumstance, asserting itself in a dialectical way "monumental" relationship, and not elusive, with the surrounding context.
The primary stakeholder of the "Inventing the School, a school as big as the world" program is the Municipality of Milan, Councilor and Assessor for Education and School Construction. The staff of the Schools Technical Area worked to collect materials relating to the state of the 24 existing school structures, mapping and establishing the basic intervention programme: cases of demolition and new construction or renovation. The Municipality participated, in July 2021, in the programme presentation. We shared a few more discussion meetings with the students on co-design, and the dissemination of the first results is included and collected in the attached e-book.
Other stakeholders took part in debate occasions. The collaboration with the Department of Human Sciences for Education of Milan Bicocca University updated the pedagogies aspect. In addition, some school deans (Istituto Comprensivo Scuola Rinnovata Pizzigoni and Parco Trotter Primary School) took part in shared meetings between primary or secondary school students with university students. The contribution of the Reggio Emilia Municipality Educational Workshop Service also brought the direct experience of Reggio Children and the educational approach of Loris Malaguzzi.
Recently, the question of the obsolescence of national school buildings has come into the spotlight thanks to the substantial funds allocated by the Italian PNRR. A systematic finance campaign for redevelopment and rehabilitation interventions of historic buildings and replacing prefabricated buildings is ongoing. The Municipality of Milan has identified a series of critical situations to allocate the available resources. Prominent among these is the problem of demolishing and rethinking the many prefabs model schools built by the Municipal Technical Office in many suburbs of the city in the 1960s and the 1970s. Inventing Schools Program can apport strategical ideas, tactic interventions, shape suggestions and specific technical support.
Towards a transformative pedagogical approach_ The program's core is the architectural-pedagogical-anthropological and social renewal design of the existing public schools and related appraisal. It has, right now, involved 23 schools in Milan plus 1 Holiday Home in Pietra Ligure, Savona territory. The courses that chose Inventing Schools were 15, corresponding to 30 teachers and 750 students: Architectural Design Studios, Landscape Design Studios, Architectural Design Studio for Complex Constructions and Thematic Studios on the built environment, at different study years.
The intention is to implement the expansion of the educational community by promoting the activation of more and better synergies between different actors and disciplines, both through the involvement of the sampled Comprehensive Institutes and through interdisciplinary contributions. Philosophy, pedagogy, anthropology and sociology are humanities that could feed the program with essential, more articulated and in-depth contributions.
We want to create a document of guidelines for sharing the necessary interventions to reconfigure the school environments in line with the proposal.
The development of space renewal projects allows us to propose the shapes of updated scenarios. The Inventing Schools programme's four identified main actions, 1-replace, 2-update, 3-adjust, 4-integrate, are reciprocally explored.
The school organization wanted to be an open and dialogue place with local realities and the territory despite the difficulties associated with the restrictions for the health emergency. The scenarios designed and still developed are based on the idea of a school that interacts with the context, whose presence and vitality go beyond the school perimeter involving the neighbourhood, the city and the citizens.
The program Inventing School: a platform for educational experimentation dedicated to school topics.
First of all, the possibility of working in a coordinated way on 24 case studies agreed upon with the School Building Department of the Municipality of Milan constitutes a search by design opportunity applied to confirmed cases of regeneration/updating the existing school's heritage. This innovative working method characterises architectural research in which the practice, made up of drawings, sketches, models, and suggestions, feeds on multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological contributions.
We experiment with an open and spread school project by integrating with the city, the citizens and the families. The project activity is carried out within the school and through a didactic model oriented toward the well-being of children and students as a self-realisation process. The project develops inside and outside the schools selected, in both formal and non-formal education contexts, favouring an idea of the school as a recognisable place with a specific identity, a democratic place of growth, theatre of encounters, exchange and enrichment to experiment with exciting relationships.
The spaces dedicated to young people are at the service of a new way of thinking about school.
The sense of belonging of the children, teachers, and parents to the school guide and regulate the new design of common areas. The aim is to define a solid relationship between the school, students, children and staff.
Where social criticality, marginalisation and sometimes violence seem to prevail, the project aims to shape an architectural project capable of recognising and offering interdisciplinary perspectives.
The re-design of the spaces such as the garden, trees, playground, canteens, places of welcome and paths, and the proposal of new shading systems for the open and internal spaces of the school are the objects of innovative experimentation.
The project builds and experiments with an exportable virtuous model of collaboration between different institutions, different departments of the Politecnico di Milano (d'ABC and DAStU), involvement of individual educating communities. We will replicate the program in other territories with the collaboration of other municipalities. It involves the public school system but could also involve private schools, perhaps the circuit of religious schools, in support of a conscious updating of teaching spaces and methods.
We propose a systemic and not episodic reasoning, a non-fragmentary strategic and tactical vision connected to emergencies or spots; the goal is to guarantee integrated and effective interventions, with shared qualitative assumptions as well as conscious management of resources.
The conceived model intends to powerfully impact the quality and integration of public policies (Municipality, Schools, ATS, University) in terms of education, instruction, inclusion, sustainability and beauty, renewing and integrating experimental work practices.
Programmatic meetings will be implemented and systematized with councillors, school managers, teachers and technicians to construct objectives that will directly affect the Public Administrations themselves and in the construction of targeted and joint field interventions.
The tested model will be exported at a regional, national and perhaps international level through the dissemination of good practices at national conferences to disseminate and share the results on a large scale.
The generation of a virtuous model is pursued that combines quality, a high level of innovation, shared action and transparency of the public sector with the efficiency of the private sector, inside and outside the world of school.
In a period of rapid change, the central role of school and educational training in civil society has led to the renewal of the complex school sphere. The possibilities of regeneration of the considerable building heritage involved are explored through the close link between places, spaces and life experiences, the practices conducted and the teaching methods that characterize them. Our methodology focuses on responding to needs beyond functionality, regulations and standards with a sensitive and open attitude towards the humanistic and social components.
The approach treats the urban space as extended and complex architecture relative to the morphological aspects. In this sense, it is mandatory to choose a vision that can focus simultaneously on small parts of the city (the school buildings and open spaces) and predict the general effects on the entire shape of the town. Fragmentation, recognition and complexity are three phases of the same design process.
The relationships with the health emergency and its consequences on the school organization and the need to explore scenarios of different ways of using spaces also made it necessary to identify the current weaknesses in the various school types. Therefore, the schools wanted to place themselves as an open and dialoguing place with local realities and the territory. The scenarios designed and still developed through Master theses, workshops, scientific research and laboratories work on a school that interacts with the context and whose vitality goes beyond the school perimeter involving the neighbourhood and the city. The idea of an open and widespread school aimed at integrating school activities with urban spaces and the regeneration project involved the context of formal and strictly school spaces, such as classrooms, laboratories, libraries, canteens and non-formal areas such as the atrium, the garden, the courtyard, the public park, the playing field, the street and the square.
Among the activities carried out and planned, some micro-interventions and local actions have intended to act directly in the places. Through cognitive, exploratory and manual experiences, we explore the forms and contents of exciting and attractive locations, intercepting all written, verbal and graphic languages with two-dimensional or three-dimensional drawings. On the one hand, the program oriented towards experimentation allows us to experience the project methodologies' learning by doing' by creating local solutions for a specific school. On the other side, we are studying how to apply a passive system in the existing school heritage that captures, accumulates and carries the energy obtained from renewable sources, the sun. This climatic attention involves maximising resources and containing consumption and polluting emissions. Architectural design is searching how to optimise the intervention with its physical environmental conditions, with the site through correct management of local natural resources.
On a broad cultural scale, the objective of identifying innovative educational landscapes demonstrates the need for a close, necessary, indissoluble alliance between technical-scientific culture and humanistic culture. At the General Conference of the United Nations Organization in Paris in 2001, Edgar Morin supported and encouraged the integration of knowledge and overcoming the closure of disciplines. The philosopher has recently taken up the concept of Earth-Homeland, in which the destiny of the human species is associated with the awareness of the common future, of the shared identity, of the common terrestrial origin of humanity.
It's, therefore, a question of improving an educational alliance between scientific culture and humanistic culture that allows us to reconsider the differences between the analytic and the synthetic, the rational and the imaginative, the analogical and the digital, the individual and the plural.
Inventing Schools, a school as big as the world, is undoubtedly in Section C: "New European Bauhaus Education Champions" dedicated to initiatives focused on education and learning. Our program still needs to be completed. This initiative has an interesting maturity level in terms of educational learning spaces applied in 24 case studies owned by the Municipality of Milan. Inventing School is included among the University projects consistent with the objectives of the NEB, Polytechnic of Milan is NEB Partner - https://www.neb.polimi.it/projects/
The attached e-book, currently being published (February 2023) contains a selection of the work carried out. These are examples of beautiful, sustainable and inclusive projects that help bring a sense of belonging, spirit and new meaning to places, communities and buildings. They are examples of architectural spaces for children, pupils and students, teachers and educators, that concern the physical transformation of places in Milan, showing how the renovated built environment can connect with the historical heritage and with the characteristics of contemporary spaces, cultural dynamics, arts, and lifestyles. They also illustrate how regenerative processes can help restore a sense of belonging or shape future-oriented ambitions for communities at a local or regional level. The redevelopment of spaces towards positive intergenerational exchanges and the construction of communities take essential dimensions. We are candidates to receive the 2023 Prize from the European Commission to have the opportunity to extend the program in others Municipalities and to improve the program studying toolkit for the interventions of regeneration of the schools. We are organizing the possibilities to enlarge the topic on the interior design, the forniture, and elements such as outdoor sunscreen, to apply to the facades of the existing School. Our daily life brings a sense of belonging on a local scale to schools with an innovative identity.
The importance of promoting education for sustainable development and actively integrating sustainable development into education is one of the goals of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, Goal No. 4). Inventing Schools aims to promote the role of architectural space within education and training practices in order to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all." The goal of "Inventing schools" is to develop, in coherence with our Master study program (Master Degree in Architecture and Urban Design and Master degree in Sustainable Architecture and Landscape Design are the two prominent participations of Inventing Schools program), integrated skills between architecture, pedagogy, social studies, urban studies and new technologies. These skills can become the assets of future designers and municipal technicians, reducing the distance between disciplinary fields and encouraging a multidisciplinary approach.
