PRIMARY SCHOOL - "GABRIO PIOLA"

Purpose:
Elementary school with 15 normal and 7 special classrooms, the gymnasium, assembly room, dining room and administrative offices.
Structure:
The bearing frame of the classrooms is in reinforced concrete with roof beams in lamellar wood; the central cylinder is in reinforced concrete;
the gymnasium, dining room and assembly room have a reinforced concrete frame infilled with brick.
Systems:
The need for maximum flexibility of teaching space led to the choice of a floor radiation panel heating system.
External finishings:
Towards the garden the classroom fronts are completely glazed. The frames are in painted aluminium.
The gymnasium, dining room and hall are built with cement blocks measuring 20 x 20 x 40 cm, alternated with horizontal unfaced brick course.
The ground floor of the front hall is entirely glazed towards the entrance and inner garden. The first floor is a compact cylinder, with arrow-slit windows.
The central lantern has a glazed perimeter and roof in wood with external finishings in aluminium.

The school is composed of two architecturally different parts.
1) The classroom block is closely linked to the green area, with sunlight and views favourable to teaching.
2) The main hall gymnasium and dining-room blocks are directly related to the surrounding urban context and grafted into the double-height cylindrical volume of the entrance hall.
Also located on the first floor of the latter are the Principal's office and the library.
The new building at Giussano lends itself to a great many interpretations, for it embodies almost all the themes of Mario Bellini's oeuvre:
the relation to the city, the relation to open space, the quality of space as the search for a liveability of buildings, the attentive use of materials as an expressive fact.
The way the plan is set out nicely sums up both the relation with city and the relation to open space. The more closed parts of buildings and those having more representative functions
define the street corner, whilst a more complex body opens towards the open space.
The different materials and distribution of composition by independent volumes heightens these intentions.

Design Team
Mario Bellini

Collaborators
Raffaele Cipolletta (coordinator), Marco Parravicini, Giovanni Pigni, Maria Grazia Angiolini