Architecture, pedagogy and community: designing the school as an inclusive process

There is a close interdependence between school and community, conceiving a new school or upgrading one is an act that strongly involves the community, that is, all the teachers, pupils, families, but also the institutional reality of reference. The ways in which school spaces - more or less advanced with respect to pedagogical acquisitions - are realized and experienced depend, in fact, on the community of reference. The physical characteristics, the construction methods, the management qualities with which the process of existence of a school building is marked from its conception, to its construction, to its management and eventual modification/re-qualification in the course of time, are to a great extent the outcome not only of the architect's skills but of a web of events, experiences, desires, hopes, energies, illusions and disillusions, of a multiplicity of people who think, live and inhabit those places every day, substantiating a position, sometimes unconscious but culturally determined, on the relationship between pedagogy and architecture. When implementing inclusive design processes for the redevelopment of existing buildings, it is important to take into account these two possible interdependent spheres of action: the material and the immaterial part of the school environment. With a metaphor dear to our times, one could say that the objective is to seek an optimal relationship between software and hardware, where the software consists of the pedagogical and didactic contents, the hardware consists of the architecture of the spaces and the design of the furnishings: a good school project must create a hardware capable of supporting over time even possible evolutions of the software without undergoing significant transformations.