Lycée Paul Valéry is a French international school in Meknès, Morocco. Responding to an increased enrollment and shifting academic needs, the client reached out to us for three new buildings (a science building, a visual and performing arts building, and a student housing building) and an overall landscape reassessment for this historic campus. The challenge to build three separate buildings within a historical campus holds in the ability to find harmony and coherence with the existing composition. Our implementation respects the existing framework while building on the historical context of the site.

The new art building along the entrance to the campus embodies strong symbolic meaning around the values of culture and knowledge. Its façade, though simple, is inspired by the pages of a book, the primary vector of knowledge. Such expression affirms both the calm and the monumentality of how open books invite students and visitors to knowledge and discovery.

In this spatial continuity, the new science building (located next to the art building) is more somber, following the themes of the book and knowledge, but its façade refers to their accumulation in the form of a very simple repetition of vertical bricks reminiscent of books on a library shelf.

The new landscape of the campus responds to building function as well as to the needs of students while respecting the existing built heritage of the old campus. We proposed a continuous pedestrian system to connect every building on campus, and social and educational amenities such as shaded seating spaces, learning gardens, outdoor classrooms, and framing gardens are carefully integrated with the pedestrian system and buildings to facilitate collaboration and the exchange of ideas.