REBUILDING THE SCHOOL ACCORDING TO THE LANDSCAPE WIDE OF THE LOCAL COMMUNITY

Can a local community, rooted in its daily landscape, upon a dramatic event such as an earthquake, come up with a vision and rise once more from its own “idea” of landscape?
Set by a team of the University of Brescia, the project of the new school in Gualdo (Macerata, Italy) started with an interactive Workshop aligned with the orientation of the European Landscape Convention on the theme of recognizing the quality of places by inhabitants. This experience has demonstrated that it is possible. The children involved in the Workshop have elaborated their idea of school through indications of spaces and functions; but, above all, they expressed their desire for landscape in the form of detailed and precise indications of panoramic views that the new building had to have. The experience of this participatory Workshop, clear in the new building, has confirmed that the local community recognizes the landscape as a place of identity: the landscape idea may be the starting-point to live again in a town that has been damaged.