Strawberry Vale.

Combining tectonic presence with human scale, Patkau Architects' latest school in British Columbia is a modern reinterpretation of rural vernacular buildings, that relates and responds to the surrounding landscape.

The new elementary school at Strawberry Vale, built on the outskirts of the city of Victoria at the southern tip of Vancouver island, is wedged conspicuously between natural and constructed landscapes. However, in a place where both the scale and beauty of the natural setting are extraordinarily impressive the constructed landscape - a mix of farms and stucco-finished suburban housing - tends to pale into insignificance.

This site was first dedicated to educational use in 1893 when a one-room school-house was built there. Subsequently, other additions were built to accommodate a growing community. More recently, with the developing needs of this west coast suburb, came the requirement for a new school designed by Patkau Architects to replace outdated buildings built there in the 1950s and provide all the necessary facilities for 300 neighbourhood children.

In response to this requirement the architects have planned a series of 16 classrooms in four clusters of four together with a library, computer centre, special educational facilities and offices for both teachers and staff in a linear building oriented along an east-west axis. A gymnasium, with its associate support spaces, planned on the north side helps to define a forecourt and the main entrance to the school opposite the existing housing.

In designing a range of modest yet significant public buildings and educational facilities in Canada over the last 10 years, the Patkaus have sought to search out the unique qualities of each project and develop them as the basis for their ideas. These efforts to explore what the architects have come to call the 'found potential' embedded in each commission have structured their way of working. It has enabled them to develop particular solutions which have created a truly civic architecture and distinctly viable alternatives to the increasingly pervasive generalism within the modern built environment and especially that proliferating across North America.

Models and large-scale fabrications have become an integral part of John and Patricia Patkau's way of working. This research technique, while making it possible to examine the tectonic detail, has also been developed to connect ideas and buildings within an expanding body of work. Describing this approach John Patkau has spoken of how these models are initiated 'for our own use after the buildings are completed ... not part of the design process of the project itself but part of a larger ongoing process'. However like all ways of working, this process is vulnerable and he went on to comment that in the studies of the Newton Library (AR May 1993), "i do not think the model successfully differentiates the opposite qualities within the building - research sometimes fails. However, after we finished the model, we realised that we had accomplished something that had frustrated us at the beginning of the project ... we suddenly realised that we had discovered the ground in a way that had not been possible in the real building'.(1)

It is this discovery of the ground, following the completion of the Newton Library, which seems to have informed the subsequent design of Strawberry Vale School. In their consideration of this project the architects have clearly seen both the beauty and the form of the natural setting - the crest of a rocky outcrop in a woodland of rare Garry oaks which are a native in this part of Vancouver Island - as both the ground and grounding of the project's 'found potential'. And from this discovery they have gone on to design a building which specifically addresses this site and the wider environmental issues of building.

So the floor of this school follows the rise and fall along the crest of the hill with groups of classrooms linked by a route which exchanges the familiar institutional corridors for a meandering path ramped and stepped in response to the actual terrain. This path is also defined as a lofty space threaded through the landscape and between buildings. It connects a series of informal spaces between classrooms creating outdoor porches for playtimes and storytelling which are sheltered from frequent west coast rains and detailed at the scale of the child in a way which recalls the work of Aldo Van Eyck, Hertzberger or Scharoun. Both classrooms and porches are thrust in among trees and rocks and consequently become a distinct part of the very special natural world of this particular site. In a way which directly connects site and programme, John Patkau sees these spaces as 'attempts to establish a positive reciprocity in the definition of woodland and schoolyard'.(2)

As if in response to the special characteristics of this natural setting, and in sharp contrast to the banality of much of the constructed landscape alongside, the detailed design of this school also recalls patterns of informed vernacular building. However it does so without resorting to nostalgia. So the school sensibly turns a predominantly solid sheltering back to the north while opening classrooms out to woodland views and the southern sun. And as the ground is sculpted out of heavy monolithic concrete, so the structure above is constructed as a series of light frames of woods. For longer spans steel is used in order to avoid cutting first growth timbers, while folded roof planes of timber boarding are designed to collect rainwater and clad internally as required in ways which echo the informal responsiveness of barn and shed building.

Strawberry Vale School has been designed to focus attention on an extraordinarily beautiful yet extremely fragile natural landscape. It also simultaneously creates a very particular setting for education at this one place in the world.

1 Investigations into the particular, John Patkau, The 1995 John Dinkeloo Memorial Lecture, College of Architecture & Urban Planning, University of Michigan, 1995, pp13-15.

2 Ibid, p36.