Seeker Heights High School: A Winning School That Trades Corridors for a Public Green Roof

Most schools are planned as a sequence of locked rooms strung along a corridor, a plan that quietly teaches students to sit still and wait for the bell. Seeker Heights High School starts from the opposite premise. Its students are called Seekers, its teachers become mentors, and its architecture removes the permanent walls that would otherwise decide how learning is allowed to happen. Above it all, a rippling green roof turns the school into a piece of landscape that the surrounding community can share.

Designed by Abolfazl Mekanik, Razi Shoaee and Mohsen Rezaie, the project was named the Winner of School Of Thought 2020. The team frames the brief around a pointed question: what should a school actually prepare students for? Their answer favours curiosity, collaboration and self-discovery over standardized memorization, and they translate that answer into open-field, project-based learning spaces that students can shape around their own interests and ambitions.

A Contoured Roof That Behaves Like a Park

From above, the building barely reads as a building. Its roof is a field of green stripes that follow flowing, contour-like lines, so the mass seems to rise out of the ground instead of sitting on it. The aerial view places it among an ice rink, tennis courts, a basketball court and a baseball field, and the roof slips into that sporting landscape as one more surface for people to occupy. The designers treat it as an environmental layer and as public, communal space at once, which is the project's sharpest move: the school's largest surface belongs to the neighbourhood as much as to its students.

That decision does real work. A rooftop that invites the public establishes a landmark without relying on height or monumentality, and it sets up the everyday overlap between students and local residents that the team describes as central to the brief. The undulating geometry blurs the edge between architecture and ground, and in doing so it softens the institutional boundary a school usually draws around itself.

Glass Edges That Keep the Inside on Display

At ground level the curvilinear form opens into long runs of curved glazing. In the winter rendering the facade glows warm while children in coats run through falling snow past a frosted tree, a scene that shows how transparency operates in both directions. From outside, the activity within is visible and approachable; from inside, students keep a constant visual connection to the seasons and the street. The designers use these large glazed facades to pull natural light deep into the plan, linking openness as an idea to the well-being of the people inside.

The curve matters as much as the glass. A building with no hard corners produces circulation with no hard endpoints, and the team describes a continuous movement system that replaces compartmentalized corridors with interconnected zones. Moving through the school becomes part of the social life of the school, where chance encounters are built into the route rather than left to the cafeteria.

A Sunken Core and Studios Without Fixed Walls

The interiors show where the pedagogy settles into form. A sunken reading hall steps down in timber tiered seating, ringed by round white bookshelves and lit by a circular skylight above, so reading, gathering and informal presentation can all happen on the same terraces. It matches the role the team gives to the Media Center, which sits at the heart of the plan as the intellectual and social nucleus. Around that hub they arrange discussion wings, collaborative workspaces, maker spaces, commons and open learning zones, a sequence organized by kinds of activity rather than subjects or grade levels.

The studio view extends that logic. Under a sweeping concrete ceiling hung with ring lights, easels and white tables sit loosely among wooden chairs while students pass through in daylight. Nothing here looks permanent, and that is deliberate: without fixed partitions, the school can be reconfigured as educational and community needs change. It is the spatial counterpart to the team's rejection of repetitive homework in favour of real-life projects, and to their recasting of teachers as mentors who guide individual learning journeys instead of lecturing from the front of a room.

Why This Project Matters

Seeker Heights is convincing because its architecture and its pedagogy describe the same thing. Removing permanent walls means little if the timetable still sorts students into boxes, and student-centred learning stays abstract if the building keeps funnelling everyone down corridors. Here the open plan, the continuous circulation and the central Media Center each turn the educational argument into a spatial one, which is likely why the jury singled it out among the School Of Thought 2020 entries.

The roof carries the larger lesson. By handing its biggest surface to the public, the project treats the school as civic infrastructure rather than a sealed institution, a place where learning spills into the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood is welcome back in. Questions of acoustics, supervision and phasing would need resolving in a built version, but as a proposition it shows clearly that how we arrange space can change how young people learn to think.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Abolfazl Mekanik, Razi Shoaee, Mohsen Rezaie

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Project credits: Seeker Heights High School by Abolfazl Mekanik, Razi Shoaee, Mohsen Rezaie School Of Thought 2020 (uni.xyz).