This is our first application, on a boarding school, of our
"pedagogical architecture” concept. On a retrofit. With a VERY LOW BUDGET.
The place, ill designed and poorly built, used to murmur to
the kids’ souls: “I despise you, you have never been worth any attention and
nobody cares”. No right to privacy, no respect, no sense of quality, no
consideration for students as human beings, no vision of any acceptable future,
etc… A boarding school for decades, dating back from a
time of generalised social suffering, this was a place of frigid severity,
rather than one for nurture and blossom, or for values and reference building.
For years, the teen-agers, many of whom had not really
chosen to be here, had reacted by destroying everything, defying any adult
authority and any attempt to educate them. We arrived in a nightmare, a post
war vision.

We proposed to use space as a tool to help the kids feel
like valuable and responsible persons who enjoy a valuable member status. We
said: we believe in you, you are worth it; you have have everything you need to
be successful.

After developing ‘pedagogical architecture’
for years, a meeting point of semiotics and architecture, we attempted to use
the potency of space to serve youngsters: their self-discovery and adult
development are intuitively be nourished by a new dynamic of relationships, and
by their appropriation of a landscape untouched for centuries. The project
incorporates life-building guidelines on key philosophical axis: guaranteed
intimacy vs socialisation groups, structure vs freedom, fleeting vs lasting.

In the same time, despite of a very low budget, we were able to find some
magical light and real beauty in the previously hidden high volumes of the
building, and to provide every student with a personal working place, a proper bathroom,
a personal space bubble, as well as different settings of qualified places for
social life. And everything was designed to be as “indestructible” as possible.

We also associated the youngsters, the parents and the
faculty members to the process, from the very beginning. And during the construction
works, the kids favourably lived elsewhere, in a friendlier environment, as a
mind resetting time.
The results were astonishing: soon after returning, the
kids, who once used to live in a permanent state of rebellion, setting a
challenge to the adult environment on a daily basis, began to nurture a self
esteem, and to show a very different attitude towards adults and education. Years
later, it turns out that the academic results have considerably and durably
risen while the violence has stopped. The building was never vandalized again.