"Hillary Clinton" School

Located along Kamza's boulevard, "Hillary Clinton" school (HC) is one of the schools with the highest pupil capacity in the country, hosting 1300 pupils ranging from 1st to 9th grades. Bordered by another school and a kindergarten, HC stands in the middle of a dense educational nucleus right next to the city's main urban circulation axis. Amid an intensive and crowded atmosphere, the project's design concept focused on developing a sense of belonging, creating spaces to accommodate and foster interaction among pupil groups of different sizes and interests.

The program is laid out by giving value to existing site potentials like the small but life-giving courtyard close to the boulevard, and by creating new spatial intersections and convergence points, serving for both collective and individual experiences.

By setting back its footprint from the boulevard the building creates a buffer zone to be used as a recreational area for pedagogical purposes or extra-curricular community activities. The building volumes are composed by grouping educational and administrative functions, centred around an elevated inner courtyard. Despite being encircled by the circulation spaces, the central courtyard creates a semi-private experience of seclusion through the translucency of the glass blocks lining the corridors, becoming a place for a temporary escape with smaller groups of friends.

The southern part of the courtyard gives light to a dynamic interior staircase, which serves as an open auditorium for day-to-day social interaction and occasional communal activities. The stairway is at the same time the main vertical circulation element distributing pupils on all floors. The sports hall becomes a central player in the building, located below the interior courtyard, as a transparent volume extending from the underground floor that becomes visible on the ground floor.

The ground floor hosts large community spaces: an auditorium of 240 seats and a large library with direct access to the existing dense vegetation in the front yard. The double-height library is visually connected to the teachers' room. The overall design makes sure to create buffer areas both at the entrances and within the blocks to increase the building’s energy efficiency and prevent large heat losses. The western and southern corridors give access to primary school classrooms, on all floors. The eastern corridor connects the special pedagogical rooms, infirmary and psychologists’ offices. On the first floor, there is direct access to the open central courtyard above the sports hall.

In a plot of 5175m2, the footprint of the building is 2820m2, with a total area of construction of 10107 m2. The school investment is carried out under the Reconstruction Program of the Albanian Government, funded by KfW Investment Bank in collaboration with the Albanian Development Fund (ADF) as the project executing agency.