Entanglements | Farm School

Sandra Puga

This proposal for an outdoor farm school is sited at UBC Farm, a twenty-four acre, working farm located at the south end of the University of British Columbia Campus. The design works to interrogate the complex relationships between urban and rural, outside and inside, old and young, the natural and the human made. The design draws inspiration from the sloping hills and rolling fields of the farm and includes greenhouse classrooms, planting porches and shared food preparation and dining spaces for classes from kindergarten to grade three. The school encompasses three building wings connected by exterior breezeways and steel-grid catwalks. The sloping green roof of the project is activated as a growing space between skylights, which cut through the three slanted hills to allow light to penetrate into the space below. The project attempts to create a merging of farm and school by letting the building become part of the physical landscape itself. This allows for the activities of school to extend out into the natural world and for the learning opportunities of the farm to continue on into the classroom.