Middle East School

This boarding school offers a diversity of teaching and living spaces in a compact layout. The school is located in an elevated arid plateau, with large temperature differences between day and night and summer and winter. The compactness serves to keep the walking distances short and protected and to increase social interaction among students. This planimetric density is countered by a sectional openness. Benefitting from the slope of the site, the buildings are staggered in section allowing each building to look over the one’s below it towards the valley and mountains beyond.

The diversity is achieved by superimposing three primary organizational schemes, a centralized layout, a gridded layout, and a sinuous layout. It is also achieved by providing the students with a variety of scales and types of open spaces around which the facilities are organized: a ravine, a meydan, a terraced garden, and a series of courtyards around which the boarding areas are organized.

Credits

Penn Ruderman and Cynthia Gunadi (Project coordinators), Boulos Douaihy, Marcela Delgado, Rola Idris, Wissam Chaaya, Jonathan Scelsa, Sharifa Abdulsalam, and Nayla Akl (landscape design).

Climate Engineering: Transsolar, Stuttgart
Electro-Mechanical Engineering: Barbanel, Lebanon
Structural Engineering: SKP
Transportation: ARUP, Cambridge