Team of Architects from Tree Colombian Universities Wins International Competition
An innovative proposal that is coherently set on an Andean slope, and that can be replicated in wood and conceived as a stilt building that can sit on any territory, with three envelope alternatives for cold, temperate, and warm climates, won in the “Ideas Competition for the Design of Learning Spaces”, organized by the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) and the Pan American Federation of Architects’ Associations (FPAA).
The competition, which took place in Buenos Aires, sought to promote innovative architectural proposals in line with the state of the art in the field of education, from an approach focused on student learning. It featured 75 submissions presented in four categories: New construction in an urban context; Renovation or expansion in an urban context; New construction in a rural context; and Renovation or expansion in a rural context.
In the category of New construction in a rural context, the winning proposal was “Ecosystem School”, whose author is architect and landscape architect Diana Wiesner Ceballos, in collaboration with UNAL architecture students Christian Camilo Chavarro, Maria Jose Garcia Fierro, Maria Jose Loaiza Coronado, and Paula Morales Arevalo; as well as architect Manuela Silva Orozco from Universidad de Los Andes; and Maria Catalina Ruiz Hoyos, architect from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.
A school that leans on the mountain
From the UNAL School of Architecture, students Chavarro, Garcia Fierro, and Loaiza Coronado arrived, in the first semester of this year, at the Cerros de Bogota Foundation to complete their professional internship and work with landscape architect Diana Wiesner, author of the proposal. This arose from the work that the Foundation had been carrying out with environmental education courses in the Horizontes Reserve, in the Santuario de las Mollas, within the Cerros de Bogota.
“Ecosystem School” is a multigenerational learning model that moves teaching from the classroom to the territory. The landscape itself becomes the pedagogical infrastructure. Soil, water, vegetation, and climate stop being a backdrop to become the content of training, while a nursery functions as a center for cultivation and simultaneous learning.
There are no students or age hierarchies, but participants of all ages who build knowledge collectively: children explore and play, older adults transmit crafts and memory, and knowledge circulates without a single teaching center. Play, especially in early childhood, is not recess but a method to recognize the territory and measure risk, and error is understood as a necessary part of learning.
For its part, water becomes visible instead of hiding in pipes; it is captured, conveyed, and stored in plain sight, converted into a guide and language of the territory. The built space (a network of flexible micro-spaces, without closed classrooms) is resolved with a commercial wood module, cut in standardized measurements to facilitate its assembly and transport, conceived as a replicable system and not as a closed building.
The project is conceived as a living prototype, capable of adapting to different rural territories and climates without losing its principles, and is posed not as something that is inaugurated, but as a minimum infrastructure that makes visible a community learning dynamic that, according to its authors, already exists in the territory.
Water, protagonist of the proposal
The jury highlighted that the proposal is innovative because it is coherently set on an Andean slope, a condition common to a large part of the mountain range; it prioritizes outdoor space as the true center of learning, leaving the building as a simple complement to the elements; and it proposes a multigenerational model that eliminates age hierarchies.
Its design, moreover, could adapt to different altitudinal climates, which makes it replicable across much of the Andean territory. For the structure, the team designed a main replicable module in commercial wood, with pieces up to 3.20 meters, to facilitate obtaining the material and its transport. It is conceived as a stilt building that can sit on any territory, with three envelope alternatives for cold, temperate, and warm climates.
Regarding water and other natural processes that appear in the renders, the team emphasizes that these are not added elements, but components that are already visible in the territory, such as water streams or natural processes that already occur in the Cerros de Bogota. These processes that already existed in the environment were made a bit more visible through paths and clearings inside the forest.
“Ecosystem School proposes understanding the school not as an isolated building, but as a learning ecosystem, where architecture, landscape, biodiversity, community, and territory are part of the same experience,” explains landscape architect Wiesner, director of the Cerros de Bogota Foundation, quoted in a statement from UNAL.
She adds that, “from a pedagogical standpoint, we start from a fundamental idea: the territory teaches more than learning about the territory. It is not just about transmitting knowledge about biodiversity, water, or ecosystems, but about learning directly from their relationships, their cycles, their times, and their transformations. Observing, walking through, caring for, restoring, planting, listening, and relating to the place are also forms of knowledge.”
“The building’s program leans more toward the mountain. As one goes up it, clearings and spaces are proposed that function as educational spaces,” assures UNAL student Camilo Chavarro in the same document.
Regarding other references that resemble this proposal, he adds that there are educational conceptual models that start from this basis, but a school that turns its curricular activities toward natural elements like what we propose in the Cerros de Bogota, we have not found at that level.
In turn, architect Wiesner expresses that, “Latin America has the conditions to develop its own models, deeply linked to its territories. What we need is to recognize that nature is not the stage where education happens: it is an active part of the educational process. Ultimately, Ecosystem School poses a simple but profound question: what would happen if instead of bringing learning to the territory, we designed schools where the territory itself was the one that taught?”
Finally, winning was not the end of the process, but the beginning of another. The award came with the commitment to adjust the proposal to make it more replicable, something the team already resolved with envelope variations for different climates. Now they are working, together with landscape architect Wiesner, on adapting the design to an actual plot in the Horizontes Reserve, in the Santuario de las Mollas. Only after that adjustment will they begin seeking funding to build the school, so there is still no set date to see it standing.