Bernard Tschumi Architects winds helical slides through school science centre
A skylit atrium traversed by staircases and slides forms the heart of Philo, a ring-shaped science centre at a school in Switzerland by international studio Bernard Tschumi Architects.
Philo sits on the campus of the Institute Le Rosey boarding school in Rolle, near Geneva, and contains five storeys of classrooms, laboratories and social spaces.
The centre is positioned alongside a metal-domed music venue called Carnal Hall, which was completed by Bernard Tschumi Architects in 2014.
They are described by the studio as "two circular semi-twins", which deliberately contrast with the architecture of the rest of the campus.
"The client's request was to differentiate the new buildings from the historical campus and its vernacular pitched roof buildings," said studio founder Bernard Tschumi.
"Dynamic circulation and movement vectors activate the building inside and outside. The central atrium acts as a covered public square and the project's centre of gravity," he told Dezeen.
Three concentric layers organise the plan, with a central ring of rooms opening onto communal spaces that overlook the atrium from deep balconies, and an outer ring with views out to the landscape from planted terraces.
These are punctuated by a central glazed corridor, which spills into what the studio calls "collision spaces", designed to encourage social interaction.
Philo's classrooms were designed with maximum flexibility in mind, featuring movable partition walls that allow for its 90 individual rooms to be reconfigured and combined.
Four circulation cores are positioned evenly around the circular plan, while at its centre, the atrium has a spiral staircase and two helical metal slides that wind around each other, accessed from its fourth and fifth floors.
To the north and south of the plan, large segments have been given over to a stepped entrance area and a flexible hall with a fully glazed wall.
The material palette combines predominantly white and glazed surfaces in the classrooms and labs with timber surfaces for shared social spaces and the hall.
"Philo uses a similar material palette to its earlier companion Carnal Hall: steel, glass, concrete, and wood," explained the studio.
"The shared vocabulary unifies the two buildings yet allows each to express its own identity and relationship to their common context," it added.
Another educational project by Bernard Tschumi Architects is a glazed science centre for Paris-Saclay University in France, which features a large atrium overlooked by social mezzanines and bridges.
In 2022, we interviewed Tschumi for our deconstructivism series. He said the style's legacy makes him "want to retreat to the back of the room".
The photography is by Iwan Baan.
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