The Docks school in Saint Ouen is in a strategic urban location, in the middle of an urban complex composed mainly of high-rise office blocks and housing. The scheme is in the form of a mass built in stepped tiers on the east, on the main street, which is extended by large canopies and which folds in crosswise strips on the site’s diagonal to face southwards. These stepped crosswise strips are separated by internal gardens which open wide east-west transparent views into the school while allowing clear identification of the various teaching areas open to the light and to the peace and quiet on sheltered internal patios. Facing southwards, the school is arranged in a succession of gardens and volumes in brightly-lit terraces which gradually descend to free the view and to let in maximum sunshine.
Related Projects
AA School 2016-2017 "Architecture as a Lever of Transformation"
Salwa Mikou & Selma Mikou - Unit Master inter 16
Aimé Césaire school complex
Saint-Denis, France 2009
A coloured roof which gives reference to the lanterns of the cathedrals next to the building.
The body of the building seen from the main street shows a glazed screen façade giving the possibility for transparency in the interior gardens and under the coloured ceiling.
Jean Lurçat High School
Saint-Denis, France 2014
Architecture in Nature: a series of separate but linked blocks in a park which are unified by buffer areas open onto planted patios and by an undulating folded metal roof
School complex and leisure center G.Valbon
Bobigny, France
A visually remarkable amenity in the city centre , visible by its façades and its roof, a founding element of the project. We designed it to be both welcoming and protective, turned inwards towards inner courtyards to ensure privacy.
Albert Samain High school
Roubaix, France
A school merged with the landscape, looking onto a red beech tree and a canal
Science park for Mobility
Valenciennes, France
A composition of linear strips strongly inspired by the concept of flows and movement inherent to the question of mobility and speed which forms a topography on the scale of the landscape
Training center for Sustainable Development
Marrakech, Morocco
A raised building, composed of crosswise bands, suspended in mid-air between courtyards and gardens to free the space on the ground and create transparency and depths of field on the site
Academy of Arts
Tallinn, Estonia
The project is designed as connected fragments: blue islands that are both isolated from the façade by circulation areas and open to an inner sea. The inner void of the courtyard evokes the outline of the Tallinn shoreline and contrasts with the regular oblong form of the external volume
University complex
Ratzeburg, Germany
We designed the building with free, flowing forms that sensitively link together the project’s internal and external spaces and which describe a sensual, organic figure on the site
Louise Michel high school
Epinay-sur-Seine, France
The fluidity of the built volume makes it possible for the new college to be read with litheness and sensuality in the urban landscape while giving the façade multiple