16-UNIT TIMBER KINDERGARTEN IN KOČEVJE REPLACING OBSOLETE DISPLACED UNITS REUSING BROWNFIELD LAND
The kindergarten built in Kočevje on brownfield land regenerates part of town by condensing programme previously dispersed in unfit buildings. The availability of preschool education has greatly increased for the local community including Roma children. The involvement of end users in the process resulted in a building that emphasizes inclusion, community, and the right to a humane learning environment. Built entirely from wood and wood-based construction materials it achieves passive standard.
Local
Slovenia
Kočevje, Municipality of Kočevje
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-08-31
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): SVET VMES Architecture Studio Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Ana Last name of representative: Krec Gender: Female Nationality: Slovenia Function: Architect, co-founder and partner Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Slovenska cesta 27 Town: Ljubljana Postal code: 1000 Country: Slovenia Direct Tel:+386 40 613 716 E-mail:ana.krec@svetvmes.si Website:http://www.svetvmes.si
URL:https://www.instagram.com/svetvmes/ Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): #svetvmes, #svetvmesarchitects, #vrteckočevje, #kocevjekindergarten, #timberkindergarten, #timberkindergartenarchitecture
URL:https://www.facebook.com/svetvmes/?ref=hl Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): #svetvmes, #svetvmesarchitects, #vrteckočevje, #kocevjekindergarten, #timberkindergarten, #timberkindergartenarchitecture
Yes
New European Bauhaus or European Commission websites
The new timber kindergarten in Kočevje has a high social and technical sustainability level. It offers a great increase in the availability of affordable preschool education to the local community boosting the possibility of inclusion of otherwise overlooked Roma children with a capacity for 350 children all in all. The building was conceived through the process of an open public architectural competition, opening the process to the best possible results while creating a positive example for a wider community.
The building is condensing several unsustainable units providing a new learning environment that emphasizes the children’s freedom of choice by creating various nooks, the right to privacy with spaces of seclusion, the possibility of learning by observing other users of the kindergarten, development of spatial sensitivity through diverse spatial experiences including sincere use of building materials with tactile surfaces, and others.
From its inception the municipality strived for a kindergarten, that would embody the ideals of sustainable development. The building is almost entirely constructed of wood and wood-based construction materials. The structure is mainly cross-laminated timber exposed to the interior, insulated with wood fiber, and protected by a wooden ventilated façade consisting of thermally treated spruce. The building achieves the ‘Passiv Haus’ standard, also by utilizing district heating powered by wood biomass burning.
The building itself organizes units around two atria, that allow for light to reach the deep ground floor plan and add to the spatial experiences, with younger children staying on the ground floor with a direct connection to the exterior playground while the older children's home rooms inhabit the first floor with direct access to the roof playground. This way the footprint of the building is minimized while creating enough exterior playground area and direct access for all playrooms.
REVITALISATION
SUSTAINABILITY
TIMBER CONSTRUCTION
LEARNING SPACE
INCLUSION
REVITALISATION
The existing lot was a brownfield land in the centre of town. By building here we were regaining lost land and not claiming new one, working to densify the town, keeping the kindergarten close to the centre and community, thus reducing car commute.
SUSTAINABILITY
The new kindergarten has a high level of social and technical sustainability. It has become a sort of hub of activity surrounding preschool education in the municipality. With its multifunctional hall that doubles as meeting space, auditorium, cinema, and sports room for children it brings together the community, creating a sense of belonging for children as well as parents and grandparents, helping it entwine with the local community guaranteeing its longevity.
TIMBER CONSTRUCTION
The building is made from timber which saves and binds CO2. Only through prefabrication and the wood hybrid construction, it is possible to save truck journeys and reduce the construction time. Timber also improves the living climate, generating a positive effect on the human-physiological level.
LEARNING SPACE
Contemporary learning space should act as a permeable membrane that programmatically and infrastructurally ‘breathes’ with the community. It must be inclusive, placing children in its centre. They should have the opportunity to cooperate, learn, feel good, develop a good measure of curiosity, responsibility, and independence. The well-being of children has a direct impact on their development, performance, relationships with their peers, educators, and parents. Architecture is a third teacher and plays a vital role in the well-being of children and staff.
INCLUSION
The building does not exclude its urban surroundings, it is transparent to show the children to the community and vice versa, it shows the teachers to the parents and the cleaners and cooks to the children. It shows everybody has a role in the community, all of them essential ingredients to everyone’s well-being.
The kindergarten has been designed for more than just one aesthetic image. Its envelope closes towards the urban northern side of the plot, creating one appearance and opens to the southern playground exposing the warm timber interior of the playrooms being in dialogue with its context.
The wooden construction is emphasized and consistent from afar through the timber façade. Wood in an urban setting is anything but common in Slovenia. Wood stands for liveliness and warmth in the townscape. The Kočevje region is known for wood production, so this also connects the building with the place. The wooden building of this scale interests and attracts passers-by and instigates a discussion in the community regarding the sustainability of buildings and construction materials.
The volume of the building is divided into smaller modules, that reduce the scale of the building and bring it closer to the scale of children. In the interior, the design emphasis was given to child spaces with the highest aesthetic in mind to instigate spatial sensitivity in children and their caretakers. The irregularly shaped façade nooks, soften the building and place children as actors in the living façade – everybody wants to play in windows. The building lives through the users and becomes a stage for the everyday life of children, their parents, their teachers, their cooks, and cleaners, …
The interior of the building shows off its wooden structure as much as possible, to give the interior a contrasting warmth. The interior thick playroom walls allow for storing of daybeds, toys, creations and form playful, upholstered nooks that allow children to peek into the outside world, and observe their friends arriving in the morning or their grandparents in the afternoon to pick them up. The main stairs are doubled by a tunnel that only kids can use, to try and beat their parents to the top where a slide that disappears into the floor awaits.
In a country where almost, all parents are working parents, good preschool education and care for young children is essential for a successful community. The project was of great importance in increasing the availability of spots in the municipal kindergarten. By constructing a 16-unit kindergarten the municipality received a building that is more economical and sustainable while creating space for 350 children, making it more affordable for parents. With greater availability inclusion of Roma children will also be easier as there is less pressure on the open spots. The municipality has been active in promoting and attracting Roma parents to enrol their children in kindergartens through various workshops. Compared to the old, dilapidated and closed off kindergarten, the new one is more open, transparent and with its various play spaces, far more attractive to children and parents.
The project has been conceived as a transparent public investment from the start. The solution was selected from a variety of proposals through an open public project competition. The proposal was additionally augmented through jury suggestions to the winning proposal and later discussions with the municipality and end users.
In terms of accessibility for all, the building is designed for easy access for people with disabilities, while one of the units is designed and equipped for children with developmental disabilities.
Amongst other election promises that got the current mayor elected was the promise of finally building the ever so needed kindergarten, which for a smaller municipality was no small feat. In his first term preparations were started for the open public competition which brought results and the kindergarten was built in his second term, he is now serving the third term. The competition jury was comprised of selected local representatives and expert architects.
The final design was obtained through an Open Public Project Competition tendered by the Municipality of Kočevje in the organisation of the Slovene National Chamber of Architects and Spatial Planners. This alone already lends a high level of legitimacy to the project and guarantees a high-quality result. Furthermore, the project was augmented by including the suggestions of the expert jury of architects and later discussions and further development with the municipality and the end users.
The project was co-financed by the Municipality of Kočevje, Eco Fund, and the Slovene Ministry of Education, Science, and Sport. The municipality has been supportive from the start and has been working towards a new kindergarten for several years already.
Slovenian Environmental Public Fund awarded the project the highest possible co-funding due to the high environmental and sustainability demands that were met during the planning and construction phases. This both incentivized the client to build a more sustainable building and promote it in the region.
The Ministry of Education, Science, and Sport awarded the highest number of points in their open Tender for Co-funding of Investments in Educational buildings by Municipalities, due to the demographic conditions of the site, support of decentralization, preparedness of the documentation, and high quality of the project.
The kindergarten is a complex public building, that must fulfill many demands, both set by Slovene rigid building legislation, added rules, the client, and the end users. It is a transdisciplinary design process where the architect represents merely one of the many voices.
The design process itself was started through a public competition, where we architects invited other experts from the fields of structural, electrical, mechanical, and fire engineering and landscape architecture to give the proposal the best opportunity of success. All continued their work as part of the design team through to the end with additional members being added along the way. The engineer for food preparation, acoustics, and environmental technology as well as traffic engineers, and graphic designers were also brought on. Through careful management and guidance from our side, collaboration, and discussions to resolve dilemmas, all demands to create a highly efficient and comfortable building were considered and resolved successfully.
The programming side of the design can be described through our practices’ one ongoing project of intervening in existing educational buildings, enhancing the ‘in-between’, collective space potential, through which we encounter and take in knowledge from the fields of psychology, sociology, pedagogy, and many more. This is reflected in the way we designed the kindergarten itself, not as much an institution but as an indoor play and learning landscape that enables the children and staff to interact with the building, discover and understand it, and use it to socialize and develop. Here the inputs from the end users, regarding the daily rhythm of children and their activities were crucial and augmented our design process. At the same time, we were careful not to pass on the hidden curricula, that are ever so present in every established institution.
A dilapidated brownfield land in the center of Kočevje has been revitalized by introducing an essential communal program – a kindergarten. Instead of placing it on the green, picturesque periphery as it is common in Slovenia, usurping new land – an ideal which should no longer be followed, it upgrades a post-industrial complex site, which was anything but beautiful. For many, the proximity of Roma community, industrial and commercial facilities presented an obstacle. For us it was a trigger to respond with a site-specific building that reacts and makes use of these promising urban conditions, to create unique spatial qualities, such as atria, rooftop playground, window niches, viewing the surrounding program as learning opportunities for children, thus becoming communal learning, and gathering place.
Kindergartens are important communal programs in a country where approx. 85% of all children of ages 1-5 years and around 94% of children between 4 and 5 years, just before they start primary school at the age of 6. Preschool education is not obligatory and not free, it is however heavily subsidized according to the economic status of the families. In this sense building a kindergarten is a strong argument for building a strong community and a building for those who need it most. The Roma families tend to send their children to kindergarten less because of their socio-economic status, the lack of space in kindergartens only increases this problem, as the municipality is less invested in their inclusion.
The municipality of Kočevje is far removed from the center of Slovenia and is considered a border region. This project undoubtedly helps decentralize Slovenia and creates a strong incentive for locals not to move to the capital, Ljubljana.
The building itself is becoming a center and a case study for preschool education and inclusion. The new kindergarten with its facilities enables the remaining satellite units to use the common spaces for various events.
Social and technical innovations go hand in hand, they cannot be thought of without each other.
The kindergarten is innovative in its typology, activation of its in-between spaces, program, and technology.
The shape of the building answers the demands of the complex irregular site. To make the maximum possible outdoor playground available, the building was built in structuralist principles, with two floors organizing the basic modules of two units around two atria, that allow for added natural lighting of the ground floor as well as a variety of outdoor play spaces.
The timber construction used was slender, minimizing the use of solid wood while answering all the load-bearing demands. The slabs were thin CLT in a hybrid structural system with glulam beams with the intermediate spaces filled out with insulation, creating a minimal structural system that is also insulative.
In its interior, the building is fully utilized. Thick walls are used for plenty of storage, integrating play spaces, tunnels, and passageways for children, reading nooks, and a small kitchen that children can use for cooking, subconscious learning, and physical development.
The building is also very transparent to allow children to observe as much of their environment as possible. It does not hide the viewofo the parking lot, the grocery market, the kitchen or the washing room. It exposes the teachers club room to the main hall and the atria.
The effort put into the design and construction of the building far surpasses the qualities of mainstream kindergartens that are procured through public tenders.
The kindergarten design was inspired by the theory of pedagogical expert, D. Thornburg who introduces four archetypal spaces for learning in 21st century:
1. ‘campfire’ – here information is presented by the caretaker/teacher,
2. ‘watering hole’ – here learning happens through activities and conversation with peers,
3. ‘cave’ – reflection – usually a quiet and solitary space,
4. ‘life’ – representing children’s context.
Thornburg’s concepts are ground-breaking because they are direct, evocative and spark imagination across disciplines. This is important when designing educational buildings that should reflect a transdisciplinary design process. With campfires, watering holes, caves, and life everyone can imagine a particular ‘spatial-pedagogical’ setting.
Henceforth the main hall can be a performance space, a gym, or a community gathering place, a perfect example of a large ‘campfire’. A playroom, be it inside or outside in the form of two atria, represents smaller campfires. The green atrium with a hill is a perfect setting for a group picnic and storytelling under a tree, the blue one enables gathering around water, a puddle that dries out over time.
‘Watering holes’ for learning through play in small groups are enabled with smaller sub-spaces on the corridor: slide and climbing tunnel between floors, children’s kitchen where they bake cookies, a table shaped like a four-leaved clover for art activities, upholstered Lego and reading nook enable complete immersion of children in reading or building activities. Yellow, irregularly shaped, upholstered nooks in the façade represent our ‘caves’ – comfortable spaces for seclusion, daydreaming and observation of close and distant neighbors.
‘Life’ – is represented through a variety of neighboring activities – pharmacy, market, municipal building, printshop, housing, parking, neighboring Roma community, etc. – all visible from the yellow façade nooks. Children learn by observing this daily community rhythm.
From the very beginning, the focus of our practice was on educational buildings. Although we are formally a “for profit” company, we feel and function more like an association, always putting change for the better before profit. Between 2011 and 2022 we analyzed about 35 schools and established contact with 81 schools on our initiative without any financial support from “top-down” organizations. As a result, 23 schools went ahead with conceptual strategies for renovation, and 10 of them realized our ideas, which resulted in 51 small interventions ranging from 4 to 600 m2 in size, giving us a broad understanding of the existing situation in educational buildings in Slovenia. We see our mission in raising awareness among stakeholders (principals, teachers, support staff, parents, children, and architects) of the problem of understanding ‘in-between’ space in Slovenian educational architecture as well as its design, social, and learning potential. By presenting international positive case studies, we acquired our first projects, which once realized received responses from the stakeholders and increased the visibility of our approach. The experience acquired through this ongoing dialogue was implemented in the kindergarten which is now informing designs of other new and existing educational spaces drawing from gained experience. Kočevje kindergarten has since become a case study for other professionals from the fields of pedagogy, architecture, and engineering that are interested in observing new solutions implemented in the building, either pedagogical, technological, functional, or organizational. The building and the involved professionals inform future clients regarding design, building management, and building organization. Since the newly built kindergarten has recently been used for the annual meeting of Slovenian kindergarten principals, we can say the further direct influence of positive examples are being shared throughout Slovenia.
We see education as the most important sphere of human activity in the 21st century. In fact, education is the foundation of progress, and it alone can save us from ruin. Every single challenge that humanity is currently facing (climate change, equality, human rights, ecology, space, and social change) is connected with education, and for this reason it is the focus of our practice, research and should be the focus of every community that has the ambition to develop sustainably.
Our argument is that Slovenia’s high inclusion rate of children in preschool education, where children learn through play, doing and observation leads to good academic performance and socialisation later on (Slovenia holds consistently high position in PISA rankings). Henceforth the inclusion of those same children in a well-designed, materially sincere, spatially diverse kindergartens where everyone finds a place of their own increases their well-being and development of their spatial intelligence that will result in increased aesthetic norms and expectations. These same individuals will one day be policymakers, clients, responsible users and promotors of quality public architecture.
The kindergarten faces additional global challenges at the local level, the innovative timber construction sets new standards and makes a significant contribution to decarbonisation as well as use of district heating powered by local wood biomass waste burning and not using any natural gas for other uses of the building.
Creating a building for 350 pre-schoolers also addresses the question of availability of preschool care and therefore of inclusion of Roma children as many new spaces are made available as well the welcoming and attractive nature of the building which is more inviting for children as it is more an indoor playground than an institution.
