Dream school

BPAS Architects recently completed a new campus in Durbanville, outside Cape Town, for independent education provider Curro Holdings.

Photography: Burger Engelbrecht, 3sixty Photography

A 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.

Yellow accents were inspired by the field of canola flowers that occupied the site in its previous incarnation as farmland.

Teachable spaces are created everywhere around the campus, including this outdoor amphitheater, which remains flexible and multifunctional.

The clever configuration of timber stairs and seating makes for a flexible performance/ congregation/ seating area.

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 stakeholders, including students and teachers. They also travelled widely to investigate international precedents that “challenge the traditional narrative” inherent in conventional educational architecture.

While BPAS visited successful and inspiring examples of progressive educational architecture in European and Scandinavian countries, they found their most case studies in countries with similar social and economic contexts to our own. The social diversity, climate and cultural influences in North Africa, India and South America, and the architectural approaches they encountered in those regions, proved far more instructive.

The layout of the school building takes the form of two arms embracing a central courtyard.

For example, Collen cites the standard conception of a classroom as having “four walls and a roof”, which was totally debunked in their investigations. “We saw that a tree can be an educational space,” says Collen. The disruptions brought about by two years of learning during a global pandemic also freed up conventional notions of movement through campus and between classrooms, leaving institutions, teachers and learners more flexible and receptive to alternative approaches.

As a result, BPAS developed a flexible and highly efficient arrangement in which every space is potentially a learning and teaching space, rather than just having dedicated classrooms.

The building itself is sensitively integrated into its natural environment. The site was originally agricultural land, and Collen recalls that when he and his team made their earliest site visits and surveys, there was canola growing “everywhere” on site. “[It was] like a yellow blanket over the field,” he says. The vivid horizontal bands of green vegetation, yellow fields of flowers and blue

sky provided the “horizontal scale” and a bold palette of primary colours for the campus. While there was no significant architectural context, the nearby mountain range, Collen says, provided a “beautiful backdrop” and prompts for “how it should be articulated and how it should be placed into the environment”.

A skylight above the stairwell floods the reception area with natural light.

In the interior, breakaway spaces, lounges and comfortable nooks create impromptu teaching spaces beyond traditional classrooms.

Raw, honest materials like concrete are softened with tactile timber detailing.

At its most basic, the school building takes the form of two arms embracing a courtyard, creating a central, sheltered and welcoming space at the heart of the school. Collen says, beyond this, BPAS found opportunities to “create little spaces” – nooks and breakaway spaces, amphitheatres and courtyards and lounges – all around the campus, indoors and out, which would manifest as “teachable spaces”.

“One of our approaches was to say that none of the spaces is reserved for a singular purpose,” says Collen. Every opportunity was investigated. The idea of a tuck shop or cafeteria, for example, was dispensed with, replaced with a restaurant whose kitchen does double duty as instructive case study for the teaching of consumer studies. The restaurant seating area space is also a potential learning space.

Collen notes that studies of the “economics of space” show that one of the most underutilised spaces in traditional school architecture is the staff room. Instead of a conventional dedicated room, teachers are provided with an integrated lounge area, which can also function as another teaching space when not in use. Similarly, individually allocated offices have, with the exception of the executive head, been replaced with hot desking areas.

The very flexibility of the campus and teaching spaces allow opportunities for a variety of teaching styles, from theatre seating to workshop-style environment. Small and large groups can be accommodated. “It opened up the opportunity to use spaces more than once,” says Collen. Beyond that, he says everywhere are interactive elements and “little surprises”, such as pull-out ottomans, quiet corners and portal windows looking at mountains.

He also notes that this approach shifts the educational narrative from one in which the teacher is necessarily the custodian of the learning environment to one in which learners play a more active role. He explains that learners are allowed to suggest where lessons might take place, and flexibility allows for a certain level of spontaneity and for their interests to guide the curriculum and the learning process. This creative engagement with the space activates the potential of the educational environment as “third teacher”. Poetically, before construction began, the architects created an opportunity for the learners who would attend the school to write their names, or perhaps a wish or a hope for themselves or the school, on a brick. Their messages – their identities, dreams and ambitions – were subsumed in the construction of the school, hidden but absorbed into the built fabric of the campus.

The campus includes 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.

Professional Team Architects: BPAS Architects Structural Engineer: KLS Consulting Engineers Electrical Engineer: KLS Consulting Engineers Civil Engineer: KLS Consulting Engineers Mechanical & Fire Engineers: Fire Mechanical Wet Services Engineers Quantity Surveyor: Calcoli Projects Acoustic Engineer: Mackenzie Hoy Consulting Acoustic Engineers Audio-visual Consultant: PJK Project Management Interior Design: Bsense Interior Architecture Interior Design: ORC Architectural & Interior Design Studio Landscape Architecture: CNDV Landscape Architects Main Contractor: MNK Projects