Evelyn Grace Academy by Zaha Hadid

TheEvelyn Grace Academy è the building that enabled Zaha Hadid’s firm to win the Stirling Prize for the second consecutive year. It is an architectural complex consisting of four different schools that share facilities and common areas. È a complex that embodies the American-originated principle of "schools within schools," which envisions small independent schools within a single building. The school, built almost entirely with non-public funds, è an Academy, that is, a public facility that, compared to traditional schools, enjoys greater independence in its educational choices and also receives aid from private sponsors. The Evelyn Grace Academy is a school within a school. The Evelyn Grace, in particular, is one of the eight Academies of the ARK (Absolute Return for Kids) Foundation, established by various investment funds that, in agreement with the public system, creates new schools that aim to offer exceptional opportunities to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. These are, in fact, buildings constructed in difficult urban areas that seek to raise the quality of the educational service offered. The request called for a school building for 1,200 students, divided into two middle schools and two high schools of no more than 330 students each, to be built on a lot that was about four times smaller than the size usually considered ideal for such capacities, in which several playgrounds and the athletic track (Evelyn Grace è specialized, in addition to math and science, in sports activities) were also to find space. After studying the hypothesis, preferred by local urban planners, of building the school on the perimeter of the lot by taking up the size and organization of the small traditional dwellings on the site, Zaha Hadid preferred to compact the building by organizing it as a single building body. A unique and open gesture, distinguished by transparency and recognizability, which aims to "stitch up" the discordant urban fabric in which it is located, through a sinuous form that fits, bending, between the two arterial roads that characterize the site. The building is a single, open gesture, marked by transparency and recognizability. Esso is grafted onto a central axis consisting of a 100 m bright red athletic track that is literally bridged, bridged, by the Academy.