Three buildings to extend a kindergarten

Les Alliés de Chavannes kindergarten is tucked away on an island of land between the Normandy highway and the Est di Mantes-la Ville road. The original construction was a single, L-shaped volume surrounded by a garden, with the front facing onto the road. The design by GRAAL Architecture - a French-Italian practice created by young architects Carlo Grispello and Nadine Lebeau – develops around this placement, adding three new buildings in the garden. The new constructions make the original one into a long corridor that doubles as the entrance hall before directing the children towards the extensions. Multiple connections are created to weave together the interiors and exteriors, producing a dynamic between school activities and the passing of the seasons. In the words of the architects, "the overall approach naturally enables the whole building to interact with the topography and the existing vegetation... the choices made for the extension meant that the school building could alter the orientation and pathways for the whole school - before the extension this was impossible as the building was purely functional".