• Project: architecture
• Program: elementary school cluster
• Client: competition
• Design: Harmen van de Wal, Javier Peno, Patricia Venero, Beverley Walker
• Location: Rotterdam
• Start design: july 2008

What do kids in a run-down, totally paved neighborhood need? We could only answer that question with ‘nothing’. No playground instruments, no fixed sportsfields, no new rules. They need a piece of urban nothingness, a wilderness to play in.
When confronted with the question to design a school with sports and playground facilities to be shared with two other schools, we decided to create this playfull wildernis.

The facilities, among which a hamam, a sports center, a kindergarten an a small theater will all be hidden under a roof. The roof provides a landscape devoid of design, but full of small water streams, rocks, stones. A place without function, guidelines, a place where kids can make a mess, build huts, play with mud. In an area where obesity among kids is growing rapidly, where everything has been functionally claimed, this seems to be one of the few methods to stimulate kids to leave their computer games and to move.