The Louise Michel nursery and primary school is an emblematic feature of the urban renewal scheme for the Aubiers “priority” district in Bordeaux, characterised by 1970s apartment blocks. We have worked to design a facility that would help to positively redefine the image of the area and sustainably improve the living environment for local residents.
Located near major access routes, the project aims to reconnect the school with its pupils and their parents while providing new amenities for the community. It repositions educational and communal spaces at the entrance to the neighbourhood, has a clearly legible visual identity as a public facility and fosters a dialogue between different scales—from the verticality of the nearby housing blocks to the horizontality of the surrounding urban fabric.
It reconnects the area with the rest of the city like a bridge, opening up connections to the west and south and offering the area a fresh new face. The school also reconnects with the natural soil, combining indoor and outdoor spaces through landscape-oriented architecture where greenery plays a key role and becomes a defining element.
The concept of a “park-school” enhancing the quality of the urban environment really comes into its own in this project.

The ground floor and first floor rise in stepped formation. The L-shaped layout along the northern and western boundaries of the plot, opening out towards the footpath and allotments to the south, creates a landscaped perspective between these two areas and brings as much sunlight as possible into the playgrounds and indoor spaces of the school.
All around the plot, an array of planted embankments hugging the slope of the terrain serves as the base for the building. These rises form a natural separation between public space and the classrooms and playgrounds. The plantings continue along all the facades of the building, on the ground floor, the upper level and even the roof, which is treated as a ‘fifth facade,’ providing all the areas of the school with a green foreground. This dense greenery creates a cooling island, limits ground sealing and constitutes a biodiverse ecosystem that contributes to the project’s environmental credentials. It is also an attractive feature for the local residents, offering views of a new landscaped natural space that changes with the seasons.

The project’s aesthetic is assertively mineral and its language very horizontal, accentuated by the wide roof overhang providing protection from the sun and sheltering the forecourt. The school’s glass façade fits under this overhang, with vertical spines echoing its rhythmic pattern. On the playground side, the planted banks and overhang give way to a full-height open façade punctuated by columns and sheltered by a slatted concrete awning.
The school is clearly laid out and each area is easy to identify thanks to signage that is both fun and educational, specially designed by the firm.
The ground-level west wing houses the nursery school and opens onto the playground.Its planted roof provides the pupils with a real garden near the primary school classrooms. Accessible both from the nursery school playground via the built-in exterior stairs and from the first-floor primary school level, the garden is defined by a pattern of mounds and topographical features that create differentiated spaces laid out in a playful way which lend themselves to learning about plants.
The garden forms part of the landscaping of the school and is an important permeable space on the scale of the site as a whole, managing rainwater and contributing to the overall climatic experience. It also has a number of rotproof wooden planters for growing edible plants echoing the allotments to the south of the school, forming a learning tool, a place to socialise and an opportunity to experiment with and raise awareness of nature and ecology.
The north wing is on two levels. The ground floor houses part of the nursery school, the canteen and the administrative, multi-use and extracurricular areas of the primary school, while the upper level houses the primary school classrooms.
The interior spaces are arranged around two patios, one for the nursery school and one for the primary school, which bring in natural sunlight and brighten the circulation areas.
Each school has its own playground. Dotted with trees, plants, cork-floored play areas and benches, the two playgrounds are highly permeable and provide a landscaped environment for the children to enjoy. As playtime schedules for the two schools do not necessarily match, special care has been taken over the design of the boundary between the two playgrounds so that the nursery school is shielded from noise coming from the primary school playground. Treated as a continuation of the general landscaping, it features a series of planted mounds forming a green noise-filtering screen.

Designed with energy efficiency, scalability and carbon footprint firmly in mind, the school complex, for which design work began in 2019, is labelled E+C- level E3C1 and reached level 1 of the « Biosourced Building » french label. Bio-based materials, particularly wood, were used whenever possible: wood fibre ceilings, wood wool insulation, linoleum flooring, wooden interior doors, furniture and cladding, and play areas made of cork. 230 solar panels on the roof provide renewable energy, and the school is ready to be connected to the urban heating network of Les Aubiers.
Anticipating future changes to the way the schools operate, the floor plan and partitions as well as the overall structure and façades have been designed to ensure the durability, flexibility and scalability of the building. With this in mind, we opted for a concrete postand-beam system which has the advantage of providing open-plan, modular interior spaces. The ground floor slab and deep foundations are made of low-carbon concrete. The intermediate floors are constructed using prefabricated hollow-core labs with a compression layer of low-carbon concrete.