engleski

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 open- air 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 sus- tainability 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.

Open Air Education, Public health, Modern architecture, Contemporary architecture, Educational Buildings

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