Preface

A renewed focus on school infrastructures and their role in relation to learning process and educational objectives has begun to spread worldwide, with the start of the new millennium. This is highlighted by a number of researches, international policies and national and local intervention programmes with the purpose of supporting the dissemination of new educational models. The search for ideas and solutions—aimed at generating physical environments fit to new forms of teaching—has been developed extensively in designing new schools, and it has permitted to realise high-quality facilities of extreme interest to both architecture and pedagogy scholars. Indeed, designers had the opportunity to update school types to give space to new and increasingly varied teaching models, and this happened also thanks to the growing technical knowledge in building performance control (such as acoustics, thermal comfort, energy efficiency and so on). At the same time, however, the promotion and diffusion of innovative models of adaptation and use of the space in already existing schools seem to be much more difficult, and therefore, the amount of exemplary cases available results to be much less. Most schools of the past will be the schools for the future and we cannot continue being focused just on short-term or emergency building adaptation targets. It will be necessary to pursue the goal to redefine—as regards school estates—places and environments that could support (and indeed determine) “educational environments” in line with updated and easily implemented learning programmes. But learning is not the one issue. In fact, these places should also be able to make everybody spending their days inside feel well, and generate opportunities for the use and empowerment of the students and the wider local community, beyond school hours and activities. So, existing school renewing is a great challenge to be faced as an attempt to offer all future students (and their communities) the same educational chances, at least as regards the contribution of the “third educator”, according to Malaguzzi’s meaning. This was the starting hypothesis of a research entitled “Back to School” carried out between 2015 and 2016 by a group of scholars from the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies—DAStU—of the Politecnico di Milano and the Department of Human Sciences for Education “Riccardo Massa” of the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, in collaboration with a representative from the regional education department and some school communities.