CGZ Architecture Builds a Rampart-Inspired Playground Shelter for a Corsican Nursery School in Porto-Vecchio

A covered playground is one of the most modest commissions a school can offer: a roof, some shade, a dry place to run when it rains. At the Jean Santini nursery school in Porto-Vecchio, the Bastia-based studio CGZ Architecture treats that brief as a chance to teach the town's own history through its building materials. The school sits at the foot of Portivechju's ramparts, on a courtyard stepped across two terraces. The architects took the fortification as their reference in form, material and attitude, and built a shelter of roughly 116 m² for €240,000.

What makes the project worth your attention is not the roof but the walls. They are heavy, load-bearing and tinted with crushed white limestone from a former quarry near Bonifacio. They carry the timber roof with no intermediate supports, and they also work as benches, climbing surfaces, storage and a drawing board for local memory. The children took part from the design stage onward, and their handprints are now fired into the masonry. We think it is a clear case for frugal, vernacular construction in schools, with a level of craft that larger budgets often fail to reach.

A Roof That Leaves the Ground Free

The structural move is simple. Long concrete walls take the load, and a roof of Corsican laricio pine spans between them, so the covered area has no columns in the middle. The architects list three benefits: an open plan, fewer visual obstructions for staff supervising the children, and clear access for emergency vehicles. In a nursery courtyard, those are practical concerns. Teachers need to see every corner, and children on scooters need room to move without hitting a post.

The pine beams sit directly on top of the walls with no visible intermediate structure. That directness suits the rampart reference. A fortification does not hide how it stands up, and neither does this shelter. Sunlight comes in under the roof edge and falls in patches on the ground, so the space stays outdoor in character even when it is fully covered.

Walls That Do More Than Stand

Each wall is cut into to hold a timber niche and a built-in bench, so the structure becomes furniture. The brief described the walls as places for play, rest and climbing, and the details follow from that. A child can sit, hide or store things in the thickness of the wall instead of in freestanding equipment, which would clutter the open floor the roof was designed to keep clear.

The concrete is sanded after casting, and the white aggregate gives it a soft, mineral surface. Several trials of the mix and finish were needed to get this texture. The result reads more like stone than like a poured site material, and photographed under leaf shadow it is easy to mistake for rammed earth. It feels warmer to the hand than standard grey concrete, which matters on a surface that small children will lean against every day.

Carving the Rampart into the Courtyard

On one wall, the outline of Porto-Vecchio's fortifications is engraved into the concrete above a timber bench. It is a literal gesture, but it works for the audience. A four-year-old will not read a material reference on their own; they will notice a shape they can trace with a finger and then recognise on the walk home. The architects describe the school as a place for passing on local memory, and this is the most direct version of that idea.

Elsewhere the walls show their horizontal joints, recording how they were built in lifts. That layering ties back to the restanques, the dry-stone terraces of the Corsican landscape, and to the rampart's coursed masonry. One new wall follows the slope and connects the two terrace levels, so the shelter also makes the courtyard easier to read and move through.

Handprints Fired at 1,250 °C

The detail that will stay with the school community is the ceramic. With the local Santandrea workshop, the children pressed their handprints into tiles during a workshop on 17 October. The tiles were glazed white, fired at 980 °C and then fired again at 1,250 °C, when the glaze turns green. The panels are set into the walls, some low enough for a child to find their own print at eye level.

Participation in school projects often ends with a workshop and a photo. Here the children's contribution is part of the permanent fabric, held in the same walls that carry the roof. Through the materials, the shelter places a new generation's marks alongside the town's fortifications and its quarries.

Light, Texture and Ground

Close up, the project depends on small decisions: the edge where a pine frame meets the masonry, a thin line of sun on a bench, the soft corner of a wall in shade. The landscape strategy works at the same scale. Existing trees are kept and marked by a ground pattern that invites play, impermeable surfaces are removed in favour of natural soil and stabilised tuff, a water point is added, and endemic species are planted.

Removing hard paving from a school courtyard is now common good practice, but it is still often skipped. Doing it here, in a dense hillside centre, gives the shelter a cooler and more permeable floor and makes it more of a garden than an asphalt yard with a roof.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows the wall segments as heavy black strokes set between garden beds and neighbouring buildings, which makes clear that the walls, not the roof, organise the courtyard. The exploded axonometric lifts the timber joist grid off the walls and shows the shelter set into a ring of tiled roofs around a retained tree.

The elevations and section show a planted roof, a glazed front and columns that differ from the built shelter, so they are best read as records of an evolving design. The charcoal sketch is the most revealing drawing. Its stacked volumes and dark base show the rampart idea in its rawest form, before it was refined into benches and niches.

Why This Project Matters

Small public commissions such as school shelters, bus stops and market roofs are where most people actually meet architecture, and they are usually handled as standard products. CGZ Architecture shows that a €240,000 shelter can still have a strong concept, a specific local material palette and a structural logic that serves supervision and safety. The quarry aggregate, the laricio pine and the regional ceramic workshop keep the supply chain short and the identity local without falling back on nostalgic imitation.

The broader lesson is about authorship. By building the children's handprints into the load-bearing walls and carving the town's outline at their eye level, the project treats its youngest users as participants in the place rather than as people simply passing through it. That is the frugal approach at its best: modest means, local resources, and a building that carries the town's history in its materials.

Covered School Playground Jean Santini by CGZ Architecture (project lead Pierre-André Asara, architect Julien Casalta), Porto-Vecchio, Corsica, France. Area: 116 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Thibault Savary.

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