The government of New Zealand delegates property expenditure decisions to each individual school. Such a decentralised environment creates a challenge for school boards and principals to obtain advice on the complex issues around designing schools. To inform schools, the Ministry of Education...

Describing primary schools in a small city in Portugal is an opportunity for an overall look at the evolution of schools in general as special public buildings. A look at four of the six primary schools in the city of Caldas da Rainha shows how these public buildings have evolved, what they...

Šoštanj Primary School offers a learning process which can enrich traditional forms of schooling. It demonstrates how a school, including its infrastructure, can influence family life and the environment, creating new social patterns and a local identity. Pupils and teachers are involved in...

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...

This article explains how Ireland has incorporated low energy design into primary and post-primary schools and gives an overview of projects that have helped inform this approach.

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...

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...