Castiadas · Olia Speciosa · Futura competition 2022
A school in the landscape
The new Olia Speciosa school campus originated in the international Futura design competition, launched in 2022 for new schools within Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). The initiative of the Ministry of Education, now the Ministry of Education and Merit, concerns the replacement of existing public school buildings and is financed by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.
Three buildings, an educational landscape
The school is conceived as a small campus set among trees, in dialogue with the village’s vegetation and public spaces. Three distinct, complementary buildings accommodate the primary school, lower secondary school and shared facilities. Between them, a tree-filled courtyard gathers communal life and opens the architecture to the landscape. This arrangement balances the identity of the different spaces with the unity of the whole.
Inhabiting the thresholds
A covered gallery connects the three buildings at first-floor level. It is an inhabitable space for pausing, meeting and learning beyond the classroom. In the design developed for construction, large lightweight steel roofs extend beyond the building volumes, shelter circulation routes and shade the façades. Their overhangs create a sequence of intermediate spaces suited to the Sarrabus climate and give the school a recognisable presence in the landscape of Olia Speciosa.
Each ground-floor classroom extends outdoors into its own patio. Classroom, enclosure, gallery and courtyard form a continuous system for teaching, workshops and recreation. Green space becomes part of everyday school life; the basketball court and other outdoor sports areas complete this educational landscape, bringing learning, play and social interaction together.
From idea to construction
From the competition stage, the school has been conceived as a civic place: its shared spaces can encourage encounters between the school community and the wider population of Castiadas. Prefabricated cross-laminated timber construction, together with the building-services and energy strategy, translates this exploration into a contemporary environment attentive to architecture, ecology and inclusion. The project connects the everyday life of teaching with the social responsibility of public space.
The Futura 2022 competition visualisations document the original proposal, with its large continuous roof and educational roof landscape. They are presented as a specific stage in the design process. The revised-design renders dated 2025-08, construction drawings and site photographs describe the subsequent development of the scheme now being built. Reading the two stages together reveals how the ideas evolved while keeping the competition proposal distinct from the work under construction.