Light in Cadiz.

This school shows a quite different sensibility from most of the buildings shown on these pages. It suggests a Southern European relationship of the individual to society and humanity to the elements.

Cadiz depends on the sea and is immensely old. Founded by the Phoenicians 3000 years ago, it is built on a peninsula which shelters a great natural harbour. The other side looks out onto the vastness of the Atlantic, but you get little idea of the age and romance of the city from the waterfront, which is almost entirely lined by crass Modernist buildings - except in one place. There is a cemetery with a long white wall that brings a note of calm to the frenetic jumble. Alberto Campo Baeza's school is conceptually an extension of the simplicity of the cemetery wall (though separated from it by a nasty tower of apartments). Baeza has occupied the whole of his site, creating a pure parallelepiped surrounding a courtyard with four palm trees. The programme for the municipal school was standard: 24 classrooms were required, with a hall, cafeteria, library and gym. Planning in general is relatively conventional, with double banked corridors on the north and east sides. But the entrance sequence is quite unforgettable.

A few steps lead up from the street to the front doors that face the porter's desk. Here, space is consciously constrained to make dramatic contrast with the hall to the right. This volume zooms up the full three-storey height of the building. From it, you can go past the porter to the gym, conference room and court. But to the right, a most impressive sequence starts with a flight of stairs that rises to a platform that overlooks the ocean through a great square window carved into the front facade. (The rise in level is sensible because it lifts you up to look out beyond the busy road to the shore, sea and sky.) The hall's window is complemented by a large rectangular rooflight through which light falls onto the walls and floor to make a gigantic internal sundial: the place has remarkable presence in both space and time and it is executed with a grave, almost Roman simplicity to emphasise its phenomenological potential.

The great white blank west wall is penetrated by another much larger square hole, through which the cafeteria and library overlook the sea. Whether this is an appropriate atmosphere for a school is perhaps moot. The elegance, grandeur and simplicity of the spaces works in two ways: the architecture is tough enough to take the traffic of hundreds of kids a day up and down the stairs, and doubtless they will be at least subconsciously moved by the place as they grow up in it. But the atmosphere (to a northerner) seems institutional and rather harsh. Yet this is to ignore the fine tradition of urban schools which has flourished for at least 200 years in the more southern countries. In the north, new schools are generally expected to be surrounded by playgrounds and playing fields: they become object buildings separated from their surroundings by a sea of green. But in France, and particularly in more southerly countries with more intense light, recreation areas are often contained within the volume of the building, which itself is part of the continuity of the urban fabric. It is to this tradition that Baeza has made a most distinguished contribution, and in so doing, has reminded us of the nobility of the city in which he has worked.