School complex & community facility
In 2023, the municipality of Frouzins, located about fifteen kilometres from Toulouse, began construction of its future school, comprising seven elementary classrooms, four preschool classrooms, as well as a community facility dedicated to dance and music. In September 2024, the first pupils started the new school year there.
The Alain Bertrand School Complex is set in an area which was previously home to a shopping center:
+Facing it: Rue du Midi, its warehouses and its commercial display pools.
+To the rear: a low-density residential neighbourhood.
+Further uphill: farmland that will soon accommodate new housing.
+At the frontage: a roundabout and the departmental road leading towards Toulouse.
Here, public space is primarily car infrastructure, and the landscape is that of private gardens. The project initiates the neighbourhood’s renewal by establishing a common good. As a public institution, the school fundamentally assumes this role, along with the public space and landscape it generates.
The garden
The school is set back as far as possible from Rue du Midi. With no perimeter fence, it opens onto the neighbourhood. Into this breathing space, landscape and everyday uses slip in.
Despite the 60 parking spaces included in the programme, the surroundings of the school take on the character of a small neighbourhood garden. Planted swales, beds of acanthus, irises and rosemary, a shortcut path, solid timber benches, oaks, willows and hackberries punctuate this transitional space between city and school.
At its centre sits the Children & Community Pavilion, shared by the school and local groups. Broad roof overhangs protect the paths all around the building. In places, the overhangs widen and become entrance canopies. People wait there for children after school, chat after a dance class, or drop off a novel in the book box.
At weekends, the benches collect the confidences of local teenagers, and sometimes the snores of a nap. Nothing extraordinary: simply a recurring pattern of everyday life.
The school
In response to the heterogeneous architecture of the neighbourhood, the school adopts a composed language, carried by strong horizontal lines. Roof structures and deep eaves cap the building, wrapping it into a homogeneous whole. Between these “roof planes”, the façades feature a discreet metal cladding, punctured by large openings. More occasionally, brick walls signal entrances and mark thresholds.
In terms of massing, the elementary school is developed over two storeys (ground floor + 1) along Rue du Midi, making it identifiable from this busy axis and from Avenue des Pyrénées.
Conversely, the preschool and the dining facilities, built on a single storey, ensure a transition with the low volumes of neighbouring houses. The T-shaped layout divides the playgrounds and encourages a relationship to the surrounding residential fabric through voids and vegetation rather than built volumes: no cast shadows into the neighbours’ gardens.
The playgrounds
Preschool and elementary school each face their own playground. The enveloping organisation of the building, backed by generous covered playground shelters, ensures children’s protection.
Inside, play and learning areas overlap and blend, creating new continuities.
Loose areas in wood chips, grass-jointed pavers and the sports court encourage movement. Benches set between shrub beds foster confidences in the shade of trees. The chicken coop sparks curiosity and invites observation.
Soft, impact-absorbing landforms invite tumbling and play, while the vegetable garden invites digging, planting, and then patiently waiting for things to grow. Learning is also a matter of hands and knees.
Inside
From their respective outdoor spaces, the elementary and preschool sections each enter a through-hall that connects the forecourt to the playground. From these halls, each entity is served by its main internal street. These interior circulation spaces are conceived as fully-fledged living spaces: always naturally lit, they are wide enough to incorporate benches, storage and display surfaces. Children’s works accompany the walk—so do colours!
These colours (and other topics) were developed with the teaching teams and future pupils during workshops held throughout the construction phase. They form the common thread of each school and extend to the furniture as well as the classrooms.
Classrooms, workshops, activity rooms and dining halls open widely to the outside: playgrounds and trees for the ground-floor rooms; sky, the Pyrenees and the city for the upstairs classrooms.
Comfort
Classrooms, playrooms and dining spaces are all dual-aspect, with openings on opposite sides. Accordingly, they are equipped with motorised shed roof vents on the wall opposite the main openings. This arrangement—on both ground floor and upper floor—gives the roofs their distinctive character and shapes the building silhouette.
More specifically, it allows classrooms to benefit from optimal natural light and ensures air renewal through natural ventilation, without uncomfortable draughts in winter (vents positioned at the top of the window frames). In a logic of economy of means and energy, the mechanical double-flow ventilation system is limited to the strict minimum.
For summer comfort, the large roof overhangs and covered areas control southern solar gain: shading in summer without reducing winter daylight.
A geothermal system, combined with a heating/cooling radiant floor, improves summer comfort through passive cooling. In addition, classrooms are equipped with ceiling fans and benefit from night ventilation when outdoor temperatures allow (shed vents controlled by sensors, outside the school operating hours).
Summer comfort is further enhanced by the building compactness and thermal inertia. The measured use of concrete (internal concrete shear walls and heated/cooled slabs) improves this inertia. Elsewhere, the school makes significant use of timber: timber-frame walls for ground and upper-floor façades, and roof structures built from wood sourced in the Pyrenees and the Massif Central.
