Project Facts
- Location: Amsterdam
- Country: Netherlands
- Year of Completion: 1928
- Client: Association for Open Air Schools for the Healthy Child
- Architect: Johannes (Jan) Duiker and Bernard Bijvoet
- Size: Unknown
- Pupils: 220 [in 2008]
- Construction Sum: Unknown
Overview
In the late 1920s, shortly after the open air school movement became formalized, Jan Duiker and Bernard Bijvoet were commissioned to design an ‘open air school for the healthy child’ in Amsterdam. Their original design was intended for an expansive greenfield site in a suburb of the city where the relationship between the inside and outside could be maximised. However, the site finally selected for the school was within the courtyard of a perimeter housing block in a more urban area. The design went through several transformations to make it appropriate for its new site, but the principles of making a healthy school based on hygiene, light and air remained. In 1994 the school was completely renovated to meet today’s educational requirements.
Themes
New pedagogies and blended learning styles
Duiker and Bijvoet’s Amsterdam school is considered to be one of the most noteworthy examples of an open air school design and is thought to have influenced other schools built during the movement’s foremost period between the First and Second World Wars.
Each of the school’s four storeys houses just one indoor classroom with the remaining floor area on the upper floors being given over to two open air classrooms. From the ground floor classroom the children have direct access to the larger courtyard space within the perimeter housing. The stacked arrangement means that the outdoor classrooms are covered and therefore can be utilised in all but the most severe weather.
The structure of the building also plays an important role in maximising the relationship between indoors and outdoors. A concrete column structure on a diagonal axis to the square plan means that the building’s corners are visually uninterrupted in both the indoor and outdoor classrooms (where the original slender glazing bars, now replaced with a heavier version, also allowed for a feeling of openness and light). The structural arrangement also meant that the required concrete ceiling beams could taper towards the edge of the building increasing the amount of light that could enter the school building.
Sources
archINFORM, Open-Air School Website
Weston, R., 2004. Plans, Sections and Elevations: Key Buildings of the Twentieth Century. London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd, p.52-53.
Dudek, M.,2000. Architecture of Schools: The New Learning Environments. Oxford: Architectural Press, p.27.
Châtelet, A-M. Open Air School Movement. Article from the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society Website
