Lev Hasharon Elementary School

Narratives

Architect Narrative

PROJECT NARRATIVE

This is a community of small villages in a countryside characterized by orange orchards.
As the school site is in the midst of orange trees we decided to let this feature develop to its full potential. The complex was built among the trees as an educational message to the children of this community, empasizing their agricultural roots.
The school is designed as a village of knowledge or you might say a village of children, reflecting the villages they are coming from.
There are the village square with the offices and the children “Homes” on its banks and there is the main street connecing the junior section to the main plaza and
through the library and science lab to the gym and sports ground.
All around are the orange trees. Just like home.
The other characteristic of this school is the reinvention of the learning space.
We put aside the standard classroom and tried to design a suitable educational enviroment for this school specific pedagogic demands.
The basic idea was to enable the classroom to encompass various study groups. This is acheived by locating the tables mainly in the perimeter, and thus having
the central part of the classroom space free for different seating arrangements.
The “pure” frontal seating form has moved from the regular classroom itself to a special small lecture room equipped with the proper facilities for audio-visual representations.
Thus every age group consists of 3 classrooms with a small lecture room.
The whole scheme is a combination of classroom clusters built as composition of those basic age group units.

Educator Narrative

Educator Narrative
This new school should meet our need for change in the education system. We know the direction and we want the architects to help us formulate its 3 dimensional structure.

There are four main aspects to our demands:

The first is our deep devotion to the way of life our
villages lead. We would like to express it in the design.
We would like small units scaterred between trees for the pupils to feel at home.
The second is the creation of a new “study unit” that will suit us better than the ordinary classroom. The new
unit should assimilate the modern study systems that use
most of the time a variety of groupings rather than the traditional frontal system.
The third is the creation of 3 distinct age-group autonomous “homes”. The whole school is too big for a small
child to identify with.
The fourth aspect is our “humanistic” approach towards
the design of the school yard. We do not want a formal school yard were the teachers walk around like guards to
inspect the children. We rather like a variety of spaces that suit a variety of activities : A gathering space,
a street-like walk across the site, small spaces for small
groups and even hideouts, because to hide is a legitimate need.