Letovo School | Buro Druzhba

In September 2021, the Moscow developer Level Group announced a competition for an architectural and urban planning concept for the Letovo non-state educational center in Moscow, which includes the Letovo.Junior elementary school for grades from 1 to 6, the Letovo.Kids kindergarten and the surrounding area.

"Atelier PRO" and "Bureau Druzhba" teamed up to design a new educational center.

From the Letovo school and the Level Group, we received an expressed request to create innovation: to design a kindergarten and school space that could become a new precedent in Russia and worldwide.

But why is this innovation ripe in the education environment? The modern world changes very quickly, and school and kindergarten spaces should always remain relevant in this reality. Therefore, the core solution of our project: give the maximum freedom of space organization to a teacher and children!

The space should be as free and clear as possible. We interpret the courtyard of the school and kindergarten as a workshop of unpredictability. Here teachers and children, but not architects, will implement their ideas and express the identity of the Letovo school.

We represent this idea in the school space using four fundamentally important solutions - layers of the concept:

1. Living green landscape. The yard is the only educational space in school and kindergarten where a sense of closeness to nature is possible. It is necessary for the psychological comfort of children growing up in a big city. Therefore, the basis of the courtyard is the most diverse, rich, fun-filled natural landscape, which is very different from the urban one. This landscape forms the base with 36 types of movements. They are necessary for the harmonious growth of the child's brain.

2. "Inhabited facade"  frees up the yard space and develops the ground floor of the building. So, it becomes child-scaled, friendly, and habitable.

3. Constructor. The yard is a space for designing and a container for ideas, not for architects, but teachers and students. We deliberately exclude expensive architectural forms that will permanently fix the yard. The school community becomes its face, and this face is subject to change. Our task is to create elements based on world experience that will allow children to play and teachers to organize a learning space.

4. Educational layer "Learning environment as a three-dimensional textbook" (quoted by Ann Taylor). It is a common idea in the global educational community. We decided to implement it as much as possible in the space of the school and kindergarten. The environment is interactive and permeable for students. All technological processes and engineering communications are not hidden but transparent, and make part of training materials. Everything that can be explained using the building and landscape is projected to make the environment a full-fledged educational tool for the teacher. It contains many opportunities, and teachers leave messages related to the topic of the lessons and age-appropriate to students. For this, digital and manual forms of presenting information are used actively.

These four versatile layers can be changed and combined in different ways depending on the functions and needs of a particular yard, creating a rich and varied schoolyard system.