Located on the Esserberg estate between Groningen and Haren, the new campus will offer international and bilingual education for children and youth aged 0 to 18 years. The exceptional green location and the Bossche School architecture of the existing West Wing provide a rich cultural and historical foundation on which we are “building on” to realize a generous, cherished, and future-proof school environment.
More than in the current situation, the new campus will facilitate cross-pollination, knowledge exchange, and community building. However, in large school communities—and especially in international campuses—it is also important that students experience their own world so that they do not feel lost due to the size and complexity. We recognize this duality and aim for a school environment that offers both dynamism and openness on one hand, and tranquility and security on the other.

In designing both the buildings and the outdoor spaces they define, we are inspired by the philosophy of the Bossche School. This design philosophy provides harmonious unity through the use of a limited range of architectural elements. It is used to shape both the larger whole and the human scale. As a result, a coherent ensemble of legible buildings and outdoor spaces emerges, with a clear structure and recognizable domains that connect with the child’s experience of the world.

The historical framework of green rooms defined by tree-lined hedgerows forms the landscape backbone of the plan. It provides the campus with a sense of enclosure and serves as the unifying element that weaves the diverse programs into a single whole. The cultural-historical and landscape typology of the estate gives the campus its spatial identity. New buildings and outdoor spaces are carefully integrated as autonomous components in a cohesive architectural composition. This creates a clear structure that offers space and hierarchy for a patchwork of places designed for different target groups and age ranges. Most of the outdoor program is concentrated along the Landgoedlaan. This allows the wooded park to remain forest, unnecessary pathways to be returned to nature, and the ecological value of the estate to be enhanced.

The Landgoedlaan forms the central spatial connector of the campus. It links all facilities and gives them an address on the campus. In addition to its role as a circulation route, the Landgoedlaan provides space for encounters and interaction among different users. It acts as a xenophile space: a space for the “friendly stranger,” where hospitality, respect, and community-building are central.
The space is lined with existing monumental trees and a new pergola structure, inspired by the architecture of the Bossche School. This pergola forms a frame that defines the space from the surrounding nature, creating a sense of enclosure. The pergola not only provides the Landgoedlaan with a recognizable identity but also marks the transition between the public domain of the lane and the private schoolyards.

The original 5x5m grid in the paving of the West Wing is extended into the Landgoedlaan to structure the entire ensemble of buildings and organize the various outdoor domains. It introduces a comprehensible scale that aligns with the child’s perspective and makes it possible to structure outdoor spaces for different age groups in a clear manner. At the same time, it offers unity and recognizability for the community. The grid is made from paving bricks and filled in with reused building materials from the East Wing. The 5x5m module allows for a wide range of potential programmatic uses that encourage learning, socializing, play, and movement. Based on a catalogue, we will work with users to determine the final “patchwork of places” for the lane and courtyards.

The new buildings, as well as the extensions, adopt the architectural DNA of the existing West Wing. This results in a family of buildings that belong together while each retaining its own character. Analogous to the West Wing, both extensions and new buildings are designed as composite volumes, in which the grain size and the yellow-brown ceramic bricks of the West Wing are recognizable. Through subtle differences in facade rhythm, relief, brickwork patterns, and ornamentation, each school gains its own identity. The different domains are further emphasized in the interior design, tailored to the experience of each specific age group.

The school buildings are modular and flexible in layout (based on the standard module of a classroom), allowing them to adapt within a single structural framework to evolving educational insights and conditions. The modules can be combined to form larger spaces or subdivided further to accommodate smaller support functions. Along the Landgoedlaan, all major communal functions are organized to ensure they are visible and accessible to the campus community.

To keep new construction as compact as possible, as much of the program as possible is realized in and adjacent to the existing East and West Wings, effectively “retrofitting” them. In addition to energy efficiency and careful material selection, the design aims to create a high-quality and comfortable learning environment that is functional, cherished, and therefore future-proof.
We primarily strive for low-tech buildings that, through smart design and material choices, intrinsically support a pleasant indoor climate. The layout of the shell—with a demountable column-beam structure and a strategically chosen grid—makes it possible to reconfigure the floor plans in the future. Finally, we aim to create beloved buildings that are durable and aesthetically layered—buildings people feel connected to and take care of.

A child has three teachers: the first are the other children, the second is the schoolteacher and the third is the spatial environment. (Swedish saying)

Zwanebloem INSIDE OUT is a proposal to transform the existing 1970ies elementary school into an “Integrated Child Center”, consisting of an elementary school, nursery, daycare and community center, embedded into a unique green outdoor domain. The combination of these functions into one complex makes it possible to provide a consistent environment for the development of the child, guided by a single pedagogical vision. Zwanebloem’s vision promotes the idea of the school as foremost the place for meeting and interacting with the others, besides being a learning environment. The child becomes part of a larger whole, learning how to live together with the other children and teachers, in a community where everyone feels safe, secure and valued. The educational vision is based on a play-learning process in which the child is encouraged to shape his/her own playing and learning environment indoors as well as outdoors, in the school’s extensive and exceptional green domain. Besides the usual activities like sports, play and gardening, it is the school’s ambition to regularly organize here outdoor classes, reinvigorating the open-air school Dutch tradition.

The original building is a standardized design of the “corridor school” type with two rows of class rooms arranged on the two sides of a wider corridor area, where several communal functions are organized. A central patio that used to bring light in the central area had to make way in recent years to an enclosed playroom. Subsequent adaptations of the layout to incorporate new functions have compromised the original clear spatial design. Despite large windows in the classrooms, the physical connection between classroom and the outdoors is missing.

In order to meet the ambitions for outdoor education and the new pedagogical vision, we have literally turned the school inside out. Each classroom is provided with its own little entrance building situated in front of the existing façade and containing the garderobe and a toilet. Like this, each class has its own address at the outside domain, situated on a path that encircles the school. Each year the children move to the next class, completing during their educational cycle at Zwanebloem the complete circle. Two opposite entrance buildings define the space for an outdoor classroom, which can be used by two adjoining classes. In the other direction, this outdoor classroom is equipped with two long benches: one formed by the oversized windowsill in the original façade and the other by a large new planter containing the educational garden for each class.

Inside the school building, the original construction with columns allows for variations in the layout of the classrooms. Instead of the classic setup with large classrooms along a corridor, a new layout is proposed with “core classrooms” and “learning plazas”. Each classroom is compressed into a more compact space where the teachers can instruct the children, while the rest of the space forms together with the corridor a “learning plaza”, an open collective space shared by all the classes, where the children are encouraged to find their own place for self-study or work in groups. The resulting plan is a layered composition of parallel bands, offering a variety of spaces and learning conditions from private, quiet and intimate, to open, lively and collective.

At the core of the building, the wide corridor is extended to form a cross-like figure combining all the collective functions. The vertical arm of the cross separates and at the same time connects the school on the western side and the nursery/daycare on the eastern side. Here the new central entrance is situated as well as the coffee corner, refectory, library and meeting rooms. The horizontal arm of the cross accommodates the central kitchen, meeting rooms, a new patio that brings light and green back into the heart of the building and the playroom. The removable walls of the playroom convey the possibility to create a central plaza for school events or neighborhood gatherings at the heart of the cross.

Besides on spatial aspects, the transformation also focuses on climatological aspects, providing new insulation of the outer skin and a new ventilation system. The ventilation system is realized centrally for the daycare/nursery and decentral for the classrooms and “learning plazas”. The decentral ventilation units are placed on top of the toilet/garderobe in each of the new entrance buildings, integrating the ventilation grills as decoration in the facades.

The research was commissioned by Mevrouw Meijer, an idealistic research platform that aims to improve the architecture of schools through initiating research by design trajectories. The foundation is committed to the revaluation of existing real estate, acknowledging the societal meaning of the school building and the more prominent role of architecture in this.