BuSO De Mast Kasterlee
Praet-Verlinden architecten
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Status:
Realized
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Education level:
Special Secondary Education
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Address:
Kempenstraat 32, 2460 Kasterlee
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Client:
GO! Education of the Flemish Community
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Programme:
6 classrooms, 3 workshop classrooms, covered terraces, multifunctional space, covered play area
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Area:
1200 sq.mm2
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Number of classrooms:
3 workshop classrooms
6 classroms
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Completion:
2009
Respectful extension to a green site with pavilions
Due to a rise in the number of pupils and outdated container classrooms, there was need for a new building with 6 new classrooms and 3 workshop classrooms. Buso ‘De Mast’ offers education to children with mental and physical impairments. The new construction provides a solution for the shortage of space for the living group in ‘opleidingsvorm 2’. The children, from the age of 13 onwards, receive training with a view to their later employment in a sheltered workshop or sheltered working environment. The training programmes are always geared towards the employment offer in the surrounding sheltered workshops. Apart from all types of production line work, assembly work, sorting work and so on, attention is also paid to the care of green spaces.
The designers put the main focus on the children of ‘De Mast’, who should be able to feel at home in their school environment. The existing school buildings with their elongated pavilions, situated in a natural landscape of rolling dunes and high spruces, create a pleasant environment with a lot of direct contact with the surrounding nature. That is why visual relations have also been maintained between the new building and the surrounding landscape. By bending the roof ends upwards, the view from the rooms increasingly focuses on the surrounding forests.
The new construction intends to further develop the existing building complex and its natural setting in a respectful manner. The building leans against the existing building and uses the existing corridor by constructing a new series of classrooms against it. The building thus becomes more compact and gets better thermal insulation. 3 connecting, line-shaped volumes have been added, which refer, through their form language, to the existing pavilions and which similarly bring the daylight into the rooms and the passage by means of overhead lights.
Drastic cutbacks could be made by using a limited number of materials and a plain construction with a simple and repetitive pattern. It thus became possible to realise, within the tight budget, and on top of the 9 requested rooms, a large joint indoor space and a large covered outdoor space as well. The structure of supporting columns in mass-coloured pouring concrete carries broad horizontal concrete beams on which the continuous slightly inclined roofs rest. This clear and simple structure aims at great fl exibility in the long term. It is fi lled in with light removable partitioning walls, making the buildings easily adjustable in time. By realising a larger roof surface than the requested fl oor surface, the design also provides for a simple possibility to extend the structure in the future.