The Enrico Panzacchi School in Ozzano dell’Emilia, designed by Archisbang and Areaprogetti, combines a lower secondary school, gymnasium, and auditorium within a pavilion-based civic complex. Organized around a public pedestrian platform, the project treats the school threshold as an urban space, while its atrium, glazed learning corridors, and layered envelope mediate between education, community use, and the surrounding garden.

Scuola Enrico Panzacchi Technical Information

• Architects: Archisbang and Areaprogetti
• Location: Ozzano dell’Emilia, Bologna, Italy
• Gross Area: 4,700 m² | 50,590 Sq. Ft.
• Project Years: 2022 – 2025
• Photographs: © Aldo Amoretti

It is not a matter of creating a school that withdraws at the end of the day, but rather a place that continues to live as an integral part of the city.

– Giorgio Gazzera and Silvia Minutolo

Urban Thresholds and the School as Civic Ground

The Enrico Panzacchi School is structured around a shift in the meaning of the educational boundary. Rather than treating the school perimeter as a secure edge that separates institutional life from the city, the project extends pedestrian routes into a sequence of shared spaces. The entrance is not compressed into a doorway or gate, but widened into a public square that connects with existing routes through Ozzano dell’Emilia.

This strategy gives architectural form to a familiar but often unresolved condition in school design: the building must provide protection for students while remaining meaningful to the wider community. Here, the continuous pedestrian platform organizes slow movement between the school, gymnasium, auditorium, and neighborhood. Its brick and concrete paving, planting beds, bollards, lighting, and everyday street elements situate the complex within the ordinary civic fabric rather than presenting it as an isolated educational object.

The gymnasium and auditorium are placed along the main urban axis, where they can operate independently outside school hours. This positioning is not only functional. It gives the public programs a legible address and allows activities such as sports practice, performances, rehearsals, and community meetings to remain visible from the street. In photographs, the sports hall is seen through large glazed openings, with movement inside reflected against the town’s apartment blocks, making the school part of the daily visual field of the neighborhood.

Pavilion Layout and Programmatic Independence

The complex avoids the compact institutional block in favor of related pavilions. This arrangement allows the lower secondary school, gymnasium, and auditorium to retain distinct spatial identities while remaining connected through a shared ground. The plan benefits from this distribution: each volume can respond to its specific scale, daylight needs, acoustic requirements, and patterns of access without forcing all functions into a single envelope.

At the point where these programs meet, a glazed central volume operates as a civic foyer. It separates public access from the school entrance while preserving visual continuity between the different parts of the complex. During school hours, it supports internal circulation and supervision; outside school hours, it becomes an independent threshold for the gymnasium and auditorium. This dual condition is central to the project, since the building’s civic role depends on controlled permeability rather than unrestricted openness.

The pavilion strategy also accommodates different temporal regimes. Teaching spaces follow the rhythms of the school day, while the gymnasium and auditorium can remain active in the afternoon and evening. The internal pedestrian street reinforces this layered use: workshops and classrooms for afternoon activities line one side, while access to the gymnasium stands occupies the other. Circulation is therefore not a leftover between buildings, but a programmatic spine where educational and civic functions overlap.

Interior Learning Landscapes

Inside the school volume, the organizational center is a triple-height atrium surrounded by galleries. A broad pale timber stair doubles as circulation and informal seating, turning vertical movement into a collective spatial experience. Rows of rectangular skylights provide even top light, reducing dependence on a single facade orientation and giving the atrium a calm, diffuse brightness. The exposed white steel balustrades, visible services, and red fire-safety cabinets introduce a graphic directness that prevents the interior from becoming overly neutral.

The classroom-corridor relationship is one of the most consequential aspects of the project. Large internal glazed surfaces open teaching rooms toward circulation areas, often framed by deep timber reveals that become informal ledges or sitting edges. This transparency alters the status of the corridor. Rather than existing only as a route between lessons, it becomes a shared learning zone where visibility supports a broader sense of collective occupation. The approach also introduces borrowed light into internal areas, producing a more continuous environmental field between classrooms and common spaces.

The project extends this idea through smaller informal settings: study booths in pale green panels, reading platforms, widened corridors, workshops, and window benches with open shelving. These spaces do not replace the classroom, but they question its exclusivity as the primary unit of learning. Their scale and furniture suggest different modes of gathering, from individual study to small group work and open-ended activities. The result is an interior landscape where the institutional plan is softened by frequent opportunities for pause, observation, and appropriation.

Structure, Envelope, and Environmental Mediation

The primary construction system uses prefabricated reinforced concrete panels, with the material left visible as part of the architectural language. The facade assembly combines exposed precast concrete, thermal insulation, lightweight concrete, and an internal precast layer, producing a wall section that prioritizes constructional clarity. This choice provides the school with a robust material basis while also supporting modularity and controlled construction time. Inside, linoleum floors, acoustic layers, wood-wool panels, exposed conduits, and visible technical elements sustain the same preference for legible assembly over applied finish.

A second layer wraps the taller school and circulation volumes: a pleated perforated aluminum skin. It filters daylight, screens external stairs and structural bracing, and creates buffer zones between interior spaces and the garden. In some views, galvanized steel stairs and diagonal braces appear through the mesh as faint silhouettes, allowing the envelope to function as both a screen and a depth condition. The perforation moderates the building’s exposure without making it opaque, establishing a fluctuating relationship between students, landscape, and street.

The complex gains much of its architectural tension from the contrast between these envelopes. The school volumes combine mesh and fluted precast concrete, particularly along the garden elevations where mature trees and meadow planting temper the scale of the facade. The lower gymnasium and auditorium are clad in grey quilted panels, giving the public volumes a denser and more muted presence along the street. Large black-framed projecting windows interrupt the pleated skin at selected points, marking flexible workshop spaces and breaking the regularity of the classroom sequence. Through these differences, the project avoids a single institutional image and instead ties material articulation to program, landscape, and modes of public access.

© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo Amoretti© Aldo AmorettiAbout Archisbang and Areaprogetti

Archisbang and Areaprogetti are a multidisciplinary design team working in Italy. Areaprogetti has been active since 1995 in architectural design, restoration, and structural engineering, while Archisbang designs architecture for education, culture, work, and living, with a focus on redevelopment, sustainability, material research, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Together, their approach is guided by sustainability, inclusion, spatial quality, and the enhancement of community life.

Credits and Additional Notes

1. Structural engineers: Areaprogetti
2. Client: Comune di Ozzano dell’Emilia
3. Urban planning: Andrea Cavaliere
4. Environmental sustainability: Elisa Sirombo
5. Acoustics: Chiara Devecchi
6. Photographs: Aldo Amoretti
7. Research references or publications: Two-stage design competition Nuova scuola media Panzacchi, 2018