Summer School Vilnius 2023

Students dealt with places of education at the summer school in Vilnius
In the first two weeks of September, an international workshop was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, which focused on the possibilities of adapting the school environment to offer more spaces for meeting and relaxation.

Students from the Faculty of Architecture BUT, together with their Lithuanian and German colleagues, first visited several schools in Vilnius, the town of Palanga and the seaside Klaipeda, where the students were impressed by the primary school with the associated forest nursery. At the same time, the beginning of the summer school was dedicated to thematic lectures of individual tutors.

During the second week, the students were then divided into groups that had to fulfill a specific task - the renovation of the Peter Vileišia Gymnasium in Vilnius, a school from the Soviet era with a generous park and sports field. The goal was to update the original building and its surroundings, to create more space for relaxation and spending free time, but also to loosen the classically bound school structure of the building and reflect current teaching methods. Students asked themselves the following questions:

"How can informal spaces in schools encourage more meeting and recreation?" "Can outdoor space and the local environment become part of the whole school program, both during and after classes?"

The team of Tereza Pavlíčková and Tomáš Müller focused on the unused attic spaces, also designed modifications to the music education classroom and other elements creating immersive and interactive experiences. An example of their intervention is a staircase, allowing children to play on the railing, or an outdoor cocoon open to the sky. "It is an object equipped with glass pipes that emit different tones based on the amount of water that rains into them," explains the co-author of the proposal, Tereza Pavlíčková. To work with water, the group was greatly inspired by the introductory lecture by the Dutch architect Rianne Makkink about the Water school project.
The workshop was thus a great opportunity to open a discussion in the international team, to establish new relationships with students from foreign schools, but also to show current trends in school design.

The workshop was jointly organized by FA BUT, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University and Fachhochschule Dortmund. Pedagogically, the workshop was led by Liutauras Nekrošius, Edita Riaubiene and Kataryna Didenko (Vilnius TECH), Dolf Broekhuizen (Rotterdam), Christiane Fülscher and Diana Reichle (FH Dortmund) and Jaroslav Sedlak (VUT Brno). The workshop was implemented as part of the Erasmus+ BIP program.

Vilnius 4-15.9. 2023