School, Colombes

The aim of the project was to enrich the southern district of the ZAC de l’Arc sportif, which has just been renewed (by the arrival of the 2024 Olympic Games and the tram), and to convert an industrial site into a centre of attraction for the Greater Paris metropolis. The school group will be part of a new suburban area whose young inhabitants will be its future pupils. The project responds to the needs of a growing population by offering the quality of an ecological and modern facility.
The project is sober, with a limited carbon footprint, and includes generous vegetation. The school is anchored in the landscape and is turned towards nature, it is an inhabited island of biodiversity, a “garden school”.
The materials used are sustainable, natural and ecological: wood, gabion walls, wood-frame facades with bio-sourced insulation, and pre-greyed larch panels.

The school is open to the city, embracing the landscape, and is composed of vegetated layers from the courtyard to the roofs of the school, through a succession of landscaped areas in the open ground, vegetated terraces and planted roofs.
This school aims to become a model for the city of Colombes, benefiting the pedagogy of all the city’s schools and beyond. It aims to become an “observatory of biodiversity” in the city, in order to raise awareness of global warming among the younger generation, through practice and education.
The landscape irrigates the entire project by evolving according to its layers: vegetated gabions, oasis courtyards, extracurricular and educational gardens, biodiversity trails, vegetated roofs and canopy garden.