Early Modernist architects designed school buildings to create healthy environments for young students by offering easy physical and visual access to the outdoors, aided by large glazed expanses that admitted daylight and fresh air to the interiors. Small in scale—only one or two stories high—these early exemplars incorporated patios, roof terraces, and playgrounds within their precincts, as demonstrated famously in the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen and Perkins&Will in 1940. Although this new typology soon became extremely influential in the United States, it was heralded even earlier by such International Style architects as Eugène Beaudouin and Marcel Lods, whose École en Plein Air (Open-Air School) opened in 1936 in Suresnes, on the outskirts of Paris. More recently, the Strasbourg-based architectural firm of Dominique Coulon & Associates has reinforced the value of that legacy, as seen in its Olympe de Gouges School Complex in Gidy, in central France. Completed in 2019, the kindergarten and elementary school facility for 400 students, named for an 18^th-century female playwright and feminist, is an L-shaped two-story volumetric block of classrooms embracing playgrounds and an open courtyard.

The plastered concrete volumes contrast with surrounding wheat fields and trees. Photo © Clémente Guillaume, click to enlarge.