Hubo Studio Builds a Child-Scaled City Around a Sunlit Piazza for a Johannesburg Early Learning Centre

Most schools for very young children are designed as a sequence of rooms on a corridor, softened with bright colours and rounded furniture. Hubo Studio, led by architects Asher Marcus and Michelle Smith, took a different starting point for the Redhill Early Learning Centre in Sandton, north of Johannesburg. Completed in 2024 for Redhill School, the 2,641 m² building serves children aged three to seven and is organised as a small city: four vertical ateliers stand around a central piazza, classrooms cluster around them, and the corridor has been removed from the plan entirely.

What makes the project worth your attention is not its palette of pinks, yellows and globe lights. It is the decision to treat daylight as a building material and circulation as a public realm. The design follows the Reggio Emilia approach, which the team studied at its source in northern Italy, and Marcus describes the guiding idea as osmosis: a flow between inside and outside, child and community, learning and play. That idea earned the school Best Use of Natural Light at the World Architecture Festival 2025, and we think the recognition is deserved for reasons that go beyond good skylights.

A Piazza Instead of a Hallway

The heart of the school is a daylit atrium under a glazed roof, paved in flagstone and anchored by a potted tree. It reads less like a lobby and more like a town square, with white globe pendants hanging overhead like streetlamps. Children cross it on the way to somewhere else, and that is the point: in a Reggio Emilia setting, the in-between space is where children run into each other's work and ideas.

A fabric canopy filters the light from above, so the space glows instead of glaring. The stone floor, the arched glazed doors and the tree make an interior feel convincingly like the outdoors without giving up shelter. This is the first sign that the architects are working with daylight as atmosphere, not just as a lux target.

Four Ateliers and the Bridges Between Them

The four ateliers rise vertically around the piazza, and the movement between them is turned into an event. Timber stairs climb beside curving walkways with pale yellow railings, and a bridge sweeps across the courtyard below. For a three-year-old, crossing that bridge and looking down at classmates is a spatial experience in its own right.

Hubo Studio has avoided the usual trap of making circulation as compact as possible. The walkways curve and widen, the railings are sized and coloured for small hands, and every route has a view. Marcus has said the organisation was meant to make the school work harder spatially and educationally, and you can see that here: no square metre is just a passage.

Tiers for Sitting, Climbing and Watching

Wide timber steps run up beside the curved balcony, scattered with round floor cushions. They work as seating, a climbing frame, a reading nook and a stage, depending on the hour. Behind them, a mosaic wall by artist Usha Seejarim gives the atrium a crafted surface that catches the afternoon sun and rewards close looking, which suits an audience at eye level with it.

The same move repeats outdoors in a terraced grass amphitheatre edged with logs, stone-clad walls and boulders. Repeating the tiered form inside and out is a quiet but effective way to make the osmosis idea concrete. Children learn one way of occupying space and then find it again in the garden.

Classrooms as Studios

The classrooms flow into one another instead of closing off a corridor. A curving white table follows the wall, a cluster of skylights brings light down onto the work surface, and arched openings link each room to its neighbour. One room has a round pink rug and hexagonal stools, another a long kitchen counter with low sinks under a coffered ceiling, where children can cook and clean up as part of the day.

These are adaptable studios more than fixed classrooms, and the furniture by Innovation Factory supports that by staying light and movable. The architecture provides a strong frame of arches, light and texture, then leaves the room open enough for teachers and children to rearrange it.

Facades That Speak at Child Height

From the outside, the building presents a curved white facade of corrugated texture, punched with round and arched windows. The openings vary in size and position, which gives the elevation the irregular rhythm of a hill town rather than the repetitive grid of an institution. Below it, a terraced playground with slides, a sand pit and boulders steps down along a flagstone path.

Above, a curving yellow balustrade runs in front of a grey ribbed volume with arched windows. The colour coding is simple but useful: yellow marks the places where you hold on and move, so the same rail that guides children across the atrium bridge reappears on the exterior.

Porthole Windows and Pink Walls

On another side, the walls turn pink and textured, rounded at the corners and cut with portholes and arches. A sand courtyard sits right against one of these walls, and a rounded window in a timber slat wall frames children at a table with another climbing a boulder just outside. Indoor and outdoor activity sit within sight of each other at all times.

This is where the design gets the scale right. The portholes sit low enough for a child to peer through, and the textured render is something you want to touch. It is a clear lesson in designing the facade from the playground up, not from the street in.

The Roof as a Second Ground

Seen from above, the school becomes a landscape of four rounded, planted pavilions around a central skylight, with a rooftop play pitch and a green sports field beside it. Pink parapets curve around panels of glass that bring light into the atrium below, while yellow dormer volumes break the horizon. The glazed roof and skylights, built by Genfodt, are the technical core of the daylight strategy.

Surrounded by tiled-roof suburban houses, the building does not try to match its neighbours. It tries to be a better neighbour for its smallest users, and the planted roof terraces add usable ground on a constrained suburban site.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows how disciplined the idea is underneath the curves: four tilted roof volumes sit over a plain rectangular footprint, with the sports pitch and winding garden paths around it. The ground floor plan shows rounded rooms clustered around the central open court, with an auditorium at the edge, and no corridor anywhere. On the first floor, a rectangular perimeter of rooms wraps the four tilted stair volumes, with the hall standing apart. The playful shapes are carried by a rational frame, which is why the plan holds together.

Why This Project Matters

Early learning buildings are often treated as small, cheap versions of primary schools. Redhill argues the opposite: that the years from three to seven deserve the most spatial ambition, because children of that age learn through movement, light and encounter. By removing the corridor and putting four ateliers around a piazza, Hubo Studio has made circulation into curriculum.

The broader lesson is about daylight. Here light is a functional need, a material that shapes rooms, and an emotional presence all at once. Recognition from the World Architecture Festival, the Architizer A+Awards and the SCAPE Awards suggests the profession is noticing. We hope school boards across the region notice too, because the model is replicable in principle: a rational footprint, a generous public core, and a roof that lets the sky in.

Redhill Early Learning Centre by Hubo Studio (lead architects Asher Marcus and Michelle Smith), Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa. Area: 2,641 m². Completed: 2024. Photography: Iwan Baan and Elsa Young Photography.

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