Ceria Vertical School
This school complex project includes two schools, three sports halls, and a cafeteria. The complex is located on the southern edge of the Ceria Campus along the Canal. The proposed project is innovative, blending in with the existing landscape and reinterpreting the Campus, with architecture that places student mobility, activity, personal development, and leisure at the center of the design. Each school has its own particularities and sports hall within the building. The programs are interlinked either horizontally or vertically.
The Ceria Vertical School has a ground floor built on stilts, freeing up space on the ground and extending the park with a covered courtyard where the main entrance is located. The school’s roof houses a sports hall with a panoramic view of the city. Its position at the top of the building highlights sporting activities, and the jagged silhouette of the roof helps define the building’s identity. The façade echoes the ochre tones of the existing campus, while long concrete columns intensify the verticality of the volume and seem to support the roof in balance. The school stands like a screen facing the Ring; generous walkways on the south side act as sunshades and provide usable outdoor spaces. On the park side, the reinterpretation of the modernist strip window and disparate loggias allow maximum natural light into the building. The interior circulation spaces are deliberately oversized and punctuated with fixed furniture, making them inhabited places that go beyond their distributive function. Like an interior street punctuated with double-height public squares, these circulation spaces counteract the image of a dark and monotonous corridor.
Thanks to its slender volume, the Ceria Vertical School fits into a gradation of sizes, from the Jules Verne School (V+,2025) with its horizontal appearance to the Kitchen Tower of the VGC (XDGA, 2009). From the canal as well as from the Ring, a skyline with recognizable silhouettes emerges.
