SESC School for Secondary Education in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

July 22, 2010 Category: Education, Public Buildings

The SESC School for Secondary Education Located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Designed by Indio da Costa AUDT, was created to offer a community of secondary education students, selected throughout the nation, an education founded on academic excellence, labour ethics, and self-discipline, where living with diversity and responsibility provides a broader sense to learning. The program comprises of classrooms, workshops and laboratories, library, restaurant and leisure area, leadership centre, theater, sports facilities, coordination, and student and teacher housing.

The design challenge is to attend the idea of diversity while maintaining urban unity, defining coherent dialogues among built forms and open spaces, and providing a clear reading of the buildings’ functions and interrelations.

The program units were designed and disposed to make the school not only a place for study, but for cohabitation and construction of human ties, where buildings aren’t conceived as rigid structures but open environments for creativity, where separation between leisure and discipline is undone in the unexpected of open spaces, verandas and shadowed areas, integrating architecture and landscape.

A central plaza was created as a clearing surrounded by the main edifications, articulated by the classroom building. This volume of closed and open spaces, cantilevered over a broad open patio, offers a rich diversity of ambiances, recreating a more humane urban scale.

The landscape design proposal was conceived as an environmental mitigation instrument, which compensates construction impacts, produces favorable microclimatic conditions, and facilitates drainage control and water reservation through the construction of a central lake. Settings for encounters, the open spaces have preponderant role, unfolding in an intricate system of walkways and plazas.

SESC School for Secondary Education Design by Indio da Costa AUDT