Public Buildings

Public buildings touch the everyday flow of the city directly. A courtyard, a garden or an entrance serves not only its own program but also the neighbourhood around it; for this reason we treat open space not as what is left over from the building, but as an extension of the city. We work with what the site gives, taking slope and orientation as an opportunity for the design rather than a constraint. We look for an order in which different uses can stand together without obstructing one another, so that the building can stay open beyond its own hours. This group of mosques, schools and educational buildings has developed sometimes through invited competitions, sometimes by rethinking an unfinished construction; in both cases we were after the same thing: a civic architecture that exists through continuity rather than display, standing within everyday life.