NOAH'S ARK NURSERY, ALZANO LOMBARDO, ITALY, 2025

For over three decades, C+S Architects has imagined schools as the piazzas of small towns and villages: civic spaces, open beyond school hours, where education and community life meet. This vision, which helped rewrite the policies schools are designed in Italy, belongs to a broader idea the practice calls Future Heritage — an architecture where memory, ecology, and public life are held together and carried forward, with the school planted as a civic seed from which community can grow.

This vision finds a precise expression in Noah’s Ark, the new nursery school completed by C+S Architects in the historic park of Villa Paglia in Alzano Lombardo, near Bergamo. Designed as a transparent and flexible learning environment, the 3,380-square-metre building rethinks the nursery as a civic and cultural space: open, inclusive, and deeply connected to both landscape and community. “We conceived this school building with the idea of creating a space that could be used by the entire community at different times,” says Maria Alessandra Segantini. “This school represents an innovative approach to designing educational spaces — an act of breaking down barriers that, through transparency and intervisibility, fosters socialisation and creativity among children, teachers, families, and the wider community.”

Developed over five years on the protected heritage site of Villa Paglia, the project brings together architectural innovation, environmental performance, and a strong sense of place. Clad in white glass mosaic and articulated by bronze-framed windows and a sequence of roof sheds, the building draws on the industrial memory of Alzano Lombardo while establishing a delicate dialogue with the historic park. Its white colour recalls the famous “Bianco Alzano”, a white concrete once produced locally. Here, however, the material is reinterpreted through glass mosaic: a textured surface that catches and reverberates light, making the façade shimmer and enter into dialogue with the surrounding landscape.

At the heart of the project is the idea that a school can become a space of collective life. A large multifunctional hall, surrounded by classrooms, courtyards, and gardens, acts as the social centre of the building, hybrid in use and open to multiple interpretations. Transparency and intervisibility define the architecture throughout, encouraging curiosity, exchange, and a constant visual relationship between interior life and the landscape beyond. The school is conceived not only for children and teachers, but as a place that can remain open to the wider community beyond school hours. The choice of materials has been carefully considered: wood becomes the main point of contact between children and space, while intervisibility is promoted across all areas. “We have designed a space of potential, where every area can be transformed by the creativity of teachers or by the community that surrounds it. All common spaces are generous and can be adapted into spaces for special activities, even after-school hours. In this way, the school becomes an epicentre for the community and strengthens its identity,” writes Carlo Cappai.

The project also transforms elements of the local territory into architecture. A red-pigmented concrete retaining wall marks the entrance, recalling the terraced retaining walls of the Val Seriana landscape and becoming both infrastructure and play space. Engraved into this wall are animal figures inspired by Enzo Mari’s 1957 puzzle, turning the approach to the school into a playful and memorable spatial experience.

“For me, the memory of Enzo Mari’s puzzle goes back to childhood,” says Maria Alessandra Segantini. “On Sundays, my grandmother would scatter the wooden animals across the table in front of the fireplace, and my sister and I would reconstruct them together. I wanted this school to hold something of that warmth: the feeling of being together, of learning through play, of a world where children, animals and nature belong to one another.”

That memory becomes part of the building’s identity. The engraved animals reappear in the courtyards and garden in the form of soft anti-shock surfaces, as well as inside the classrooms as didactic tools specially designed by the practice, helping define Noah’s Ark as a contemporary educational landscape where imagination, architecture, and nature are closely intertwined.

Although developed on a single level, the school expands vertically through a carefully shaped section that brings daylight deep into the interior through large windows, internal courtyards, and shed roofs, echoing the area’s industrial past while translating it into a space for learning. Materials were selected for warmth, durability, and acoustic comfort, with wood serving as the main tactile interface for children, while generous common spaces support flexible teaching methods and a broad range of community uses.

Thanks to the use of alternative energy systems, the building achieves high environmental performance and is the first public building in Alzano Lombardo to be classified as NZEB.

More than a nursery school, Noah’s Ark embodies C+S’s broader vision: architecture not as an isolated object, but as a durable setting for belonging, where memory is transformed into a shared civic resource. As Maria Alessandra Segantini concludes: “We are honoured to have worked with the Alzano community, carefully preserving its precious historical and landscape resources and returning them to the citizens through the design of a school — or, more broadly, a new public space rooted in the DNA of the place.”

CREDITS
Client: Municipality of Alzano Lombardo
Head Designers and Design Guardianship: Carlo Cappai e Maria Alessandra Segantini, with Stefano Di Daniel, C+S ARCHITECTS

Site Supervision, Health and Safety, QS and local coordination: Remo Capitanio, with Alberto Valtulini and Marina Brambati, STUDIO CAPITANIO ARCHITETTI

Structures: Sergio Myallonier, Myallonier Ingegneria srl

MEP: Enrico Zambonelli, Loris Doneda, MCZ Ingegneria srl

Acoustics: Andrea Breviario

Geology, geotechnical consultancy: Giulio Mazzoleni, CASTALDIA

Photos: Alessandra Bello
Contractor: Impresa Perico, Giacomo Algisi, Enrico Signorelli, Andrea Persico
Subcontractors
Windows: Kreal, Lecco
Glass mosaic: Mosaico+
Fixed furniture and wall games: Falegnameria Fadel, Treviso
Floors: Vaneton srl, Modena
Lighting: Glip srl, Treviso