— The Ideal School

This is another publication that comes, quite rightly, to subsidise the study of school architecture in Portugal. Its relevance stems from the way it expands – and then refocuses – the concept of school building in contemporary times, highlighting its role as an educational “agent”, highlighting its specificity, naturally mirrored in its architectural expression and in the corresponding spatial, formal and constructive grammar, raising clues and opening space for further research.

If the school building, beyond its symbolic role of representing a basic social function – education – is an instrument for its realisation, it is therefore up to the school architecture to reproduce the ways of conceiving education and the ways of teaching and learning. This means assuming that it is also up to the architect to follow the evolution of learning theories and teaching methods. Only in this way can he find the meaning of these transformations and understand their implications in the school space where he will act.

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Teresa V. Heitor, CiTUA CERIS, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon