Disruptive Space, Tanguy Danis

DISRUPTIVE SPACE

Atheneum of Léonie de Waha, Liege – Belgium

///WHY

Education is a major element in the maintenance of the social order as many sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, Foucault, Freire and, many more have proved in the past. The place where education happens is not to be set aside as Churchill used to say: “We create building and building shape us.” Indeed, there is a low level of awareness on how learning spaces influence learning outcomes, both from the side of their designers and their users. We, as architects, have the responsibility to investigate the future of educational space in the hope of a shift of mentality in today’s society. We always build schools as hermetic elements becoming, most of the time, a heterotopia. Classrooms are mimicking the scholastic model yet; the western world set aside religion with the enlightenment century.

///WHAT I, as an architecture student and a human being, cannot believe I will able to design the future of educational space on my own. This project aims to bring to light the question of educational spaces into the architecture field and the other way around; to bring the architectural discussion into the educational field.

///WHERE

I will set this project in a high school in Belgium that promote a pedagogy of autonomy, agency and citizenship inspired by Célestin Freinet, a French educationist from the in-between wars time. The school itself represents a challenge as it is a cultural heritage that we cannot alter with lots of artworks in it.

 

///HOW

We (high school student and I) will design an extension for the school that is becoming overpopulated and, who need to refuse every year further applications. My approach will be to conduct workshops with high school students and teachers from the school. We will question together with the purpose of the classroom in the first time by looking at many examples throughout the world and by manipulating together abstract model. Then we will investigate the possibility of fragmenting the school across the city to become inclusive space part of urban life for everyone, not just with students to question the border that people draws between being a student and being an employee. Indeed, even as adult we should still have the possibility to educate ourselves.