Nouveau College de Beay-rivage

Lausanne, Switzerland

Education

4.178 m2

2026

Lausanne’s population is growing, and the school system has to absorb it. The brief calls for eighteen classes of the 7-8P HarmoS cycle, close to three hundred and sixty pupils, built as an extension of the Établissement de l’Élysée rather than a freestanding school. The building works the seam between the two institutions: infrastructure first, object second, its voids carrying as much weight as its mass. At the base it sits close to the ground; as it rises it opens up, tracking the shift from public arrival to focused classroom work.

The plot sits under the strictest protection grade in the ISOS inventory, wedged between the Collège de la Croix d’Ouchy and the Centre Pluriculturel et Social d’Ouchy (CPO). The building takes its alignment from the CPO rather than from the street, reading the block’s actual geometry instead of the regulatory line. A survey of proportions across the neighbouring buildings turned up a ratio close to the golden rectangle; the resulting 2.5 metre module was tightened to 2.25 by 2.25 metres for ease of construction. That square drives the whole building (classrooms, atria, circulation cores) sized close to a body with arms outstretched, so a pupil reads the same geometry in a floor joint and in the volume overhead.

Solid and void are designed together. Programme blocks land on the grid in a way that carves the spaces between them into interior squares. The section works the same way, anchored and responsive to context at ground level, then increasingly free as it climbs, with clusters of programme pulling apart toward the top while staying legible as pieces of the same grid.

The building steps down the slope instead of cutting into it, extending its logic past the school boundary into the surrounding public space of Croix d’Ouchy. Exterior paths run straight out of the interior squares. Mature trees already on site are kept and used to organise the outdoor spaces; the ground is built on sponge-city principles for permeability and rainwater retention; the same ecological register climbs the façades in nesting niches for swifts and bats before reaching planted roofs.

Programme runs public to private as the building rises. The ground floor opens into the surrounding fabric and carries the most collective functions, including the public-facing side of the administration. Two levels below grade absorb the site’s steep fall, including a sports hall sunk slightly into the ground to clear the required ceiling height without adding bulk above. Floors 1 and 2 hold the classrooms, modular rooms that can be reconfigured for different teaching setups, with a threshold zone where the classroom square overlaps the circulation grid. The top floor, the most withdrawn in the sequence, holds further classrooms alongside health and counselling rooms, placed there for the daylight and quiet.

Structurally, a timber frame sits on a low-carbon concrete base: paired glulam beams, hollow timber cassette floors carrying the technical runs. Cladding continues in stained spruce, chosen to weather without chemical treatment. Radiant floors draw on the thermal mass of the base for winter heating, classrooms rely on cross-ventilation, and fabric blinds filter solar gain without cutting the view out. A psychrometric study of the local climate found comfortable outdoor conditions for only 2.5% of the year; the passive strategy pushes that to 45.1%, with a dark, high-mass floor banking solar heat through winter and releasing it slowly, easing demand on the district heating network.

Status

Complete, Open Competition

Client

Ville de Lausanne

Design team

Diogo Sousa Rocha

Duarte Ramalho Fontes

Joana Fraga

Imogen Halliday

Matej Mauhar

José Queirós

Diogo Borges Ferreira

Sónia Silva

Consultants

BARBAR

ETIENNE

MAWI

MAQ3

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