The recent intervention by the architect Frederico Valsassina in the Valsassina School has granted the school complex with a new volume well defined. It’s a new school module designed to shelter classrooms, music rooms, a multifunctional space and a library. Opposite to the less interesting connotation that the idea of module has gained in what concerns prefabricated school constructions from repeated series, this module, designated as Block G and for the middle school grades, far beyond of the immediate functions for which it responds, in a good way, has an important role, by its design and composition, in the organization of the school space in general. 

A school is a place for learning. A learning that should be more transversal to the fields of knowledge but, also in what concerns the sense of community and the meaning of the use of space as enrichment for relationships within a community. A school is therefore, also in itself, and in the space organized around it, simultaneously conditioning or stimulating behaviours, a place of collective learning for the child, the youngster, the citizen in formation. It’s from school that definitely passes the “spatial” formation of all of us. The way we relate with the environment that surrounds us, from which results our capacity to organize, to demand quality, whereas to structure our life in a collective way. The school is a place of life and of social “formatting”. That’s the place where we learn how to live in community! 

That was motive that Frederico Valsassina has placed in his project in the desire to predispose the action, to fixate the scenery of the several situations, actions and uses, as also to treat the form of seizing the light or the reflex of the sky in a determined way. 

The new built block is a building for education being also a place for cultural, playful and informal gathering for the entire school community. This, at the same time that respects precisely the distributive and functional needs of a school building. This double aspect, that within the school life characterizes an actual pedagogical concept, is possible thanks to the placement and positioning of spaces for the spare time relating them with the library and the classroom’s block. This collective space formed by the patio or small square, situated between the two wings of classrooms, is accessible from the outside in an independent way and characterizes, by its presence, the “new” school.