Corner building

This corner building at the northern gateway to Geneva resolves the problem of superimposing two very different schemes: a nine-classroom private school on the first three floors, and apartments on the other four. Corridors situated above the courtyard have been used to minimise vertical traffic, which has been reduced to a single stairwell. The school corridors are superimposed by the entrances to the apartments, most of which are duplex.

The private school is entered via the covered playground, which extends into the courtyard. The ground floor houses the reception area and a large multipurpose space. On the upper floors, the classrooms face the two roads and are interconnected by sliding partition walls. The open teaching practised here encourages a degree of transparency between corridors and classrooms. The classrooms are enhanced with a colour scheme that adds a playful touch to traffic areas.

The duplex apartments on the fourth floor are of a traditional type, with living spaces at the entrance level. Those on the sixth floor are arranged in the opposite way, with the bedrooms adjoining the corridor, leaving the living spaces free to benefit from the attic terrace. The other apartments are simplex, and arranged to make best use of the available space, whilst maximising orientation and views over the urban landscape. Traffic areas are finished in the same yellow colour as the school to give the courtyard façade a unified look.

This dual-purpose development required a static load solution capable of transferring the load for the apartment dimension – a 6.4-metre grid – to a load for the classroom dimension – eight metres. The structural solution to this was found in the form of a deep beam of the height of one floor. All façades have a perforated metal finish over the same brick red colour present in the surrounding urban area. The façade on the street side is clad in glass and screen-printed to resemble perforated metal, thereby repeating the façade finish on the courtyard side.