School Of Thought: A Reggio Emilia High School Reimagined as an Open, Planted Landscape of Learning

Most schools are built around the corridor: a long, closed spine that moves students from one sealed box to the next. School Of Thought starts by removing that spine. In its place, the designers propose a high school that behaves less like an institution and more like a small city, with learning spread across levels, plazas, gardens and workshops linked by open circulation. The pandemic exposed how badly rigid classrooms and isolated corridors cope with change. This project treats that failure as an opportunity to rethink what a school is for.

Designed by Mojtaba Hooshangianshirazi, Rokhsareh Shakibayi, Hilda Khozaee and Monire Vkh, the proposal was shortlisted in the School Of Thought 2020 competition. It draws on the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, which places the student at the centre of every interaction and values independence, creativity and collaboration. The architecture tries to give that philosophy a physical form: private zones for focused work and reflection, open areas for teamwork and public engagement, and a constant thread of landscape running through both.

A Building That Sinks Into Its Ground

The section explains the project's main move. The building is partially embedded into the site, so its bulk drops below the ground plane rather than towering over its surroundings. In the rendered view, that decision turns the school's edge into terrain: a plaza, stepped lawn seating and hedges lead people across and down toward the timber-slatted volume. The threshold becomes a place to sit, linger and watch, not a gate to pass through quickly.

Embedding also serves the environmental strategy. Earth works as a thermal buffer, and the lower profile reduces the building's visual impact on its context. It is a useful reminder that how a building meets the ground can do as much passive work as any technical system added later.

A Campus Organised by Loops, Paths and Greenhouses

The site plan shows a masterplan built from experiential zones rather than leftover setbacks. Parking, walking loops, a plaza and greenhouses surround a central roofed hall, while bicycle paths and recreational courts complete a layered landscape. Movement is the organising idea: students circulate through the grounds as part of the school day, and the walk between activities becomes part of the curriculum.

Below the plan, the slatted facade appears in close-up. The designers describe a double-skin envelope that filters sunlight while letting air move around the building, improving thermal comfort and cutting energy use. Read together with the plan, the outer layer works as both a climate device and the school's public face: a soft, porous edge that suits a building trying to stay open to its neighbourhood.

Branching Columns and the Atrium as a Forest Floor

Inside, the project's ambitions become clearer. From an upper walkway, tree-shaped steel columns rise beside stepped seating and a planted courtyard with conifers. The structure deliberately echoes the landscape it encloses, so being indoors still feels close to the garden. The second view moves into the atrium itself: timber stepped seating in the foreground, glass-railed balconies above, and students working at tables beneath the branching columns.

This is where the Reggio Emilia brief does its real work. The atrium is not a lobby; it is shared learning space, auditorium and social room at once. Balconies let students on upper levels see and be seen, which builds the sense of collective presence the designers want. Natural light and vegetation reach deep into the plan, supporting the psychological well-being the proposal names as a priority.

Work Floors Instead of Classrooms

The overhead view of a work floor sums up the project's position on pedagogy. Long tables replace rows of desks, orange floor stripes mark out zones without walls, and planted terraces sit right beside the workspace with the timber-slatted wall behind. Learning reads as a workshop activity: students gather, spread out and regroup as the task demands, instead of being assigned to a fixed room for a fixed period.

The painted stripes are a modest but smart detail. They organise space lightly, leaving it open to rearrangement, which is exactly the adaptability the pandemic showed conventional schools lacked. The floor can absorb changing group sizes, distancing needs or new teaching methods without any construction.

Why This Project Matters

School Of Thought is persuasive because its ideas reinforce one another. Embedding the building reduces its scale and buffers the climate; the double-skin facade tempers light and air while giving the school a porous public face; the atrium and work floors turn circulation and gathering into places to learn. Each move supports the same argument: that a school should balance individual focus with collective life, and that landscape belongs inside the educational experience rather than outside its fence.

As a student proposal, it leaves open questions about acoustics in such open interiors and how supervision works across so many connected spaces. Its contribution, though, is clear. It treats the post-pandemic school not as a set of classrooms to be disinfected and spaced apart, but as an adaptable ecosystem where independence, nature and community share the same floor. That is a brief worth taking seriously well beyond 2020.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Mojtaba Hooshangianshirazi, Rokhsareh Shakibayi, Hilda Khozaee, Monire Vkh

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: School Of Thought, by Mojtaba Hooshangianshirazi, Rokhsareh Shakibayi, Hilda Khozaee, Monire Vkh School Of Thought 2020 (uni.xyz).