In March 2007, the Portuguese government announced an ambitious plan to modernise secondary schools by improving the quality and usefulness of its teaching and learning facilities, while putting schools back into the centre of the community of which they are an integral part.

PEB and the Ministry of Education of Portugal brought together 67 library and resource centre professionals, policy makers, educators and information technology specialists from 21 countries around the theme “Designing Schools for the Information Society: Libraries and Resource Centres”. The...

The design of this flexible school for early childhood education in Milan, Italy, takes into account children’s development and the different ways they experience space according to their age. The facilities will include not only a nursery school and kindergarten, but also a drop-in day-care...

The restoration of an historic school building in Battipaglia, Italy, will provide new public facilities and is hoped to boost urban renewal. The municipality of Battipaglia, in the province of Salerno, held an architectural competition for renovating the E. De Amicis Primary School and the...

The Intelligent Educational Training Station has been developed in Italy to meet emerging school building needs. The project, for schools from the primary to upper secondary level, proposes flexible architecture for an “intelligent school” network, and was developed by CISEM, the Centre for...

Designing school buildings to respond to change is not a new idea. But perhaps what is different today is the kind and degree of change which we have to anticipate. The OECD is carrying out projects that can help in the planning and design of future educational facilities – exploring trends in...

A seminar entitled "Designing Tomorrow's School" was organised by the OECD Decentralised Programme on Educational Building (PEB), the Irish Ministry of Education and Science and the National University of Ireland (NUI), Galway, and was held in Galway, Ireland, in September 2002. Certain...

In 2007, the author examined existing academic libraries in the United States to determine best practices for the design, implementation and service of learning commons facilities. A primary objective of this study was to discover how to create a higher education learning environment that...

The Italian city of Cattolica has developed an urban complex, the <i>Piazza della Repubblica</i>, providing a wide range of services to the public. In renovated facilities, the complex provides a modern and rational architectural setting based on the idea of the traditional town square or "piazza", an...

In November 2000, the City of Bologna, Italy, welcomed a conference entitled “Living as Students”. The event was part of the European Capital of Culture project which examined the major role Bologna has played and continues to play as a university city. It also looked at the role of cities...