Growing Curiosity: 7 High Schools Rethinking Green Roof Design

Architects: Want to have your project featured? Showcase your work through Architizer and sign up for our inspirational newsletters.  

Architecture dramatically shapes how we learn. As a transformative element to education, the spaces where we gather and study influence how we share and discover. Today, designers are increasingly blending creative learning environments and landscapes to support new education models. Integrating public space while embracing views and climate, these projects are both expressive and inclusive in nature. The designs represent new ideas on classical, operant and observational learning to reinvent expectation. Private and public alike, they provide contemporary places to build knowledge and encourage understanding.

Exemplifying this idea and the structures that support it, we’ve gathered together the following green-roof high schools from our database. As vehicles to empower learning, the projects advocate a close connection to natural systems. Created as urban landmarks and integrated ecosystems, the high schools each explore the aesthetic and performative potential of green roofs. Collectively, they expand upon existing high school typologies to shape both learning and growth.

CHIRENS HIGH SCHOOLby WIMM, Chirens, France

Set among a rustic context, this high school organizes all programmatic functions under a continuous low rooftop landscape. With the roof acting as a relief for soil to grow, the design centers on a strategy of unification over fragmentation to embrace outdoor areas.

Sterren College Secondary Vocational Education Center by Mecanoo, Haarlem, Netherlands

This colorful school building was designed to accommodate 1,000 students across six vocational courses. Located between the Delft canal and a railway, the project is embedded in the landscape around four diagonally oriented elements.

Professionnal & Technical High Schoolby marjan hessamfar & joe verons architectes associes, Mont-de-Marsan, France

Surrounded by a historic forest woodland with protected oak and pine trees, this high school design integrated formal blocks into the landscape. Clad in regional pine from Forêt des Landes, the façade was punctured with a number of openings to let natural light deep into internal spaces.

Garden Schoolby OPEN Architecture, Beijing, China

Designed as a branch campus, Garden School features abundant open spaces with an emphasis on connection to nature. Organized as a series of multiple grounds, the project includes roofs in the form of landscaped gardens around a thin rhizome-shaped slab.

The Marcel Sembat High School by archi5, Sotteville-lès-Rouen, France

Designed as a rehabilitation and extension, this project used workshop spaces to give a new visual identity to the institution. With areas for technical teaching about mechanics, the design required special attention to volumes and surfaces and how these elements fit into the site.

The Hotchkiss School, Biomass Heating Facilityby Centerbrook Architects & Planners, Salisbury, Conn., United States

As a new Central Heating Facility for The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, this project was made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The design features an undulating sloped green roof that’s vegetated with sedum connected with a bio-swale rain garden.

Jean Moulin High Schoolby Duncan Lewis SCAPE ARCHITECTURE, Revin, France

Located near the Charleville road to Belgium, this high school design is surrounded by sloping hills and forests. Merging together architecture and landscape, the project explores ideas of the forest balconies of the Ardennes region.

Architects: Want to have your project featured? Showcase your work through Architizer and sign up for our inspirational newsletters.