Dream school
Bl ue print
BPAS Architects recently completed a new campus in Durbanville, outside Cape Town, for independent education provider Curro Holdings. Phot og r aphy: Burg e r E ng e l bre cht, 3six t y Phot og r aphy
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new campus for Curro Durbanville High School opened at the beginning of this year, designed to accommodate 1 000 learners. In addition to school buildings, the 9 800m2 ‘mega’ campus includes an auditorium and studios for art music and the performance arts, plus a “400m athletics track, six hard tennis courts, four netball courts, an Astroturf hockey field, a cricket oval with nets, and a rugby field as well as an indoor sports centre with a pool.”. Landseer Collen, principal architect and director of BPAS Architects, who designed the campus, says that the design of the campus deliberately departed from traditional approaches to educational architecture, particularly the notion of static, dedicated classroom spaces and “the standard modular approach of one teacher, one classroom”. As a pioneering project for the group, the design of the campus took an experimental approach, seeking new ways to give form to the school’s theories of education, especially in a South African social and economic context. Particularly important from an architectural perspective was the notion of the “third teacher” – an approach that treats the learning environment as playing an active role in the educational process, fostering an appetite for learning and even helping shape the curriculum. To understand not just the school’s educational philosophy and ideals for the future of education in South Africa, but the types of spaces and facilities required, the architects held workshops and consultation with all
22 Leading Architecture + Design FEBRUARY/MARCH 2022
