The school and sports hall are placed in a rural community on the edge of Popovaca, a small town in central Croatia. Entering an untouched plain between a creek and a local road, the large building initiates a new coordinate system, and draws the community and natural surroundings into its programmatic quadrants providing a hospitable environment. Binuclear in its spatial organization, the building intertwines the program of an elementary school and sports halls open to the community. Divided by use on ground level and connected above ground, the school reacts to the needs of the surroundings and establishes the neighborhoods spatial point of origin. It houses an elementary school, two sports-halls dually serving the school and local clubs, and an open sports-park connecting the school to a future recreation area planned along the creek. The volumes sitting on the ground are connected on the first floor by a common gallery of classrooms and hallways overlooking the voids of multipurpose halls covered with slanted roofs. As the new focal point of a broader area, its disposition follows the ambition set by the municipality trough offering various segments to public use. The inner and outer spaces are designed to allow the dual function and future role, pulling in a new everydayness. Separate entrances extending to halls and connecting them to their respective open spaces, the deep portico of the sports-halls, the public path penetrating the divided volume, all aim to facilitate active daily use within and outside of school hours and provide a new community identity, opening parts of the school to the town in the afternoons and evenings – mainly the sports-halls and playgrounds, the multipurpose hall and the library.
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