ARCHITECTURE FOR LEARNERS: TRAINING FOR SUSTAINABILITY

School buildings design is an interesting research area, that focuses on the strategic role within training with social value.
School buildings are considered a research subject of significant importance, both for their sheer numbers and for the strategic role they play with reference to education and studies and consequent social values.
The research for ever increasing levels of sustainability in construction has lead to consider school buildings as case studies for testing innovation. Therefore, school buildings design has to focus on the planning of the relevant spaces to provide conceptual tools aimed at proactively promote and practice sustainability.
Sustainable school buildings must meet a series of requirements. First of all, they have to offer solutions as far as the functional and environmental suitability aspects are concerned, as well as technical and morphological spaces organization, which must meet regulatory requirements and provide high performance levels of micro-environmental comfort.
The second aspect relates to the strategies of sustainability to be adopted, that is, the objective is to communicate to the end users, via the building itself, how to best use its spaces and obtain the best performances out of them, as well as highlighting the building sustainable features in order to promote a higher level of awareness towards the environment among the users of the schools.
Due to the strict standards on the matter of comfort required by regulations and by the relevant research, these buildings can be considered case studies of particular interest in order to provide solutions and technical guide-lines to be applied even to different type of buildings.
This paper offers suggestions on strategies and criteria to be used in the design of eco-efficient schools in relation to international sustainability assessment systems. It proposes a wide range of practices for management and innovation of these types of constructions, mixing introductory concepts for design with actual case studies descriptions.