UP School: Motion, Perception, Learning

The design strategy common to the educational spaces for the “Up School” based in the metropolitan area of Cagliari aims to frame a flexible learning space open to experimentation and the active exploration of places. Indeed, learning does not merely mean collecting and memorizing information; it also requires the ability to select, connect, understand and integrate, first by acquiring self-awareness and by developing perceptual abilities. Space—as experienced in its dynamic dimension— plays a crucial role in this process. The principles of the dynamic perception of space established by the most important investigations in neuroscience of recent years, were declared by the experimentations of the Bauhaus workshops, ahead of their time, as being strongly related to space, body and mind. Beginning with this premise, the “Up School” project—nursery, preschool and primary school— integrates an innovative educational program with the spatial layout of its environments. These spaces are conceived as a fluid sequence of “affordances” where, from an early age, children can shape their world within a perspective guided by good sustainability practices, enabling technologies and psychomotor equilibrium. Thus, the school system changes by being more conscious of its fulcrum: namely, the psychosomatic dimension of the individual.