Built in remembrance of Italian journalist Maria Grazia Cutuli, murdered in Afghanistan in 2001, this school represents an alternative approach to emergency school design for war-torn areas.  The Aga Khan award-contest citation claims it is intended to resemble an unplanned juxtaposing of elements, like a small village, enclosed by a boundary wall. 

This school building accommodates eight classrooms, various staff accommodation, a double-height library and a garden which acts as a ‘green classroom’. Built of reinforced concrete with brick cladding, the structures are painted rather than rendered, to save costs. The walls’ range of blue tones reflects the 'lapis lazuli' pigment used on local pottery, while window frames are in contrasting red.  Unless one knows differently, from the outside the school looks like an isolated police station painted dark blue with a flag on top of its gate.

The choice of Herat for this project might be based on the fact that the foundation could raise funds and support for a project more easily in a province where the Italian army makes up a large part of the local Provincial Reconstruction Team. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the school was inaugurated by the Italian defence minister, the project architects being transported to the site in army helicopters – as illustrated in photographs published in a number of articles.

No specific complications other than the system of the classroom boxes connected by narrow, irregular, long corridors were noticed by the reviewer sent to evaluate this school by Aga Khan Awards organisation. No specific or architectural relation to nearby houses was established. As [his] guide said, the building could easily make a nice suburban guesthouse. The topography of the area is simple and flat. ... There are nearby single and double-storey houses that obviously look different.1

  • 1. Perhaps the architects had not visited Herat before, nor had much interaction with local architects. Whatever the case, one of the key points of this project was stated to be a search for an innovative educational space as an alternative to those models related to post-war reconstruction emergencies, as well as the design of the outside space as a “green classroom”. .... “A small, cobalt blue fortress set against a backdrop of the Hindu Kush mountains [incorrect name] under a great dome of sky - deep blue in summer, pregnent with snow in winter (The Architectural Review, 2011) seems to have been the concept. The publication claims that “borrowing from the idea of a regional village, with its clustered and organic - or happily symbolic - plan, the Maria Grazia Cutuli School is unmistakably its own place” (The Architectural Review, 2011).

    It would certainly seem, though, that the architects only visited Herat when the school building was inaugurated in 2011.

    Source: Abdul Wassay Najimi, in Maria Grazia Cutuli Primary School On-site Review Report, edited by Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 2013. pages 3-13

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