School Outdoor Spaces as Urban Public Space Activators. Three Case Studies in Croatia

In this paper, the authors provide an overview of schools' outdoor spaces. A brief analysis of their historical development is followed by a study of contemporary multifunctional use of school grounds primarily based on an interaction between the community and public urban spaces. Schools' outdoor spaces have lately been comprehensively researched in light of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on teaching as well as the long-standing awareness of the importance of eco-friendly living. Architectural elements of schoolyards of the early twentieth-century Open Air Schools, created to improve children's health, and the ensuing process of evolving school outdoor spaces beyond education, are detailed with a vision of connecting schools with the surrounding built environment. Through a comparative analysis of selected case studies in Croatia, the paper presents three examples of interaction between primary school outdoor spaces and urban public spaces. This interaction is a viable future trend in school design and urban planning in view of the reduction of accessible community areas with the aim of bring education back to its origins in nature and urban public spaces. © 2023, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. All rights reserved.

The Open Air School Revisited - Architectural Strategies for Healthy Learning Environments

The paper examines the architectural legacy of the Open-Air Education movement, its origins, conditionality, and strategies from the viewpoint of its impact and relevance today. While the pedagogical background of outdoor education can be traced to Jean Jacques Rousseau's idea of `natural education' as both an upbringing in contact with nature as well one catering to a child's nature, the acute reason for a large number of openair schools operating in Europe in the early 20th century were poor health conditions of children in large cities. First by necessity - a new architectural model of school emerged - the modernist pavilion school. This coincided with a wider physical and psychological hygienization of the living environment, formulated at the interwar CIAM congresses, thus producing a new paradigm. Several developments have brought the open-air education paradigm to the forefront of interest in recent years, parallelly from the standpoints of pedagogies and public health. On one hand, the growing need for environmental education with the goal to teach sustainability has resulted in an array of networks promoting learning from and through nature. On the other hand, several acute reasons ask for implementation of outdoor education, such as disorders stemming from a lack of interaction with nature during a child's development, an increasing dependence on virtual media and sedentary lifestyle, and most recently, the COVID pandemic. These motives point to a reconsideration of how a healthy school environment is defined today, what challenges it poses when facing the limited conditions of urban density and what challenges current energy consumption requirements pose on the quality of air. The paper examines contemporary school spaces viewed in light of emergent health requirements, drawing on lessons of over a century ago.