From the typological point of view, the project follows a series of long studies and experiment on educational buildging carried out in the 50’s and 60’s mainly by Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson, Arne Jacobsen and Herman Hertzberger for a school built for children.
Unlike most of the projects built at that time, that are rigorous but strongly atopical, the school in Fontana Candida interprets the context by reading it critically and very selectively: the nature of the place, a wide park on the outskirts of the consolidated city, pushed us to pursue a complex relation between the school and the land, between disappearance and figuration.
The building is a one-storey building and is characterized by a wide roof-garden covering. From above, it seems the natural extension of the park. A pattern of different-sized squares invests the building and the territory, progressively transforming the typological scheme from a linear scheme – towards the streets where the buildings and public services are – to a scheme made of pavilions towards the park; a sequence of independent cells where teaching areas are.
These characteristics give the project a structural ambiguity; in fact, the building seems to be crossed by unstable doubleness: unity/diversity, closed/open, static/dynamic. They define the urban fabric with an uninterrupted and multiple spatiality, inside which streets and squares follow one upon the other; private and public places, open and closed areas, interiors and exteriors.