Located on the northern edge of Louňovice, in the Czech Republic, the LOŠBATES School is a new elementary and secondary school and civic campus serving a group of municipalities southeast of Prague. The project brings together the Montreal-based firm Pelletier de Fontenay and SOA architekti from Prague. Initially developed by Pelletier de Fontenay and Valerio Sartori for an international competition held in 2018, the proposal won first prize among 118 entries submitted by teams from 38 countries.

The project is organized as an ensemble of interconnected volumes that distribute the school’s functions across the site while maintaining a strong sense of unity. Four programmatic clusters form a ring around a protected central courtyard, creating an ensemble that feels open, clear, and easy to navigate. The layout takes inspiration from the cloister typology, while transforming its inward-facing structure into a more porous and active organization. The ring connects the different parts of the school while also providing places to circulate, gather, learn informally, and spend time throughout the day.

At the heart of the campus, the courtyard introduces the idea of a forest within the building. Planted and animated with play areas, it creates a protected outdoor world for children and maintains strong visual connections across the school. More than a decorative void, it supports movement, play, rest, outdoor learning, and orientation. Around it, the building expands and contracts to create subtle thresholds between classrooms, shared spaces, gardens, playgrounds, and community functions.

The school’s organization supports a contemporary pedagogical model based on flexibility, variety, and choice. Generous shared areas extend the classrooms and accommodate individual work, small groups, informal teaching, presentations, and collective activities. Movable partitions, acoustic curtains, and adaptable furnishings allow these spaces to shift between quiet pockets, collaborative zones, and more open areas for shared activities. The continuous circulation loop eliminates dead ends and encourages intuitive, nonlinear movement through the building.

The project is designed not only as a school, but also as a shared civic facility for the surrounding municipalities. Beyond regular school hours, the gymnasium, cafeteria, assembly spaces, after-school areas, and elementary art school can operate independently, supporting sports, cultural activities, meetings, and community events without opening the entire building. This clear separation between school life and public use keeps the campus safe and legible for students, while giving the microregion a much-needed place for gathering and collective activity.

The building’s low, two-storey massing breaks down the scale of the program while maintaining a strong collective identity. Its horizontal composition allows the school to sit calmly between village and forest, creating a contained oasis within a vast open landscape and helping protect interior spaces from wind and sun. Landscape, architecture, and pedagogy work together as a single integrated system.

Designed to passive energy standards, the school combines a robust construction strategy with careful attention to environmental performance and interior comfort. Its envelope includes ventilated timber cladding and prefabricated GRC cornice elements, while large portions of the roof are vegetated. Air-to-water heat pumps provide the primary heating source. Rainwater is retained and reused for irrigation, toilet flushing, and cleaning, and a rooftop photovoltaic installation contributes to the building’s energy strategy.

LOŠBATES School gives architectural form to a simple but ambitious idea: a school can be more than a place of instruction. It can become a shared landscape for learning, a civic anchor, and a symbol of collective identity.