Ecca collection

Head office of the Parish Council

The first thing you notice when you look at the new head office of the Parish Council of São Pedro Fins in Portugal’s Oporto region is a shiny metal cube tilted onto its edge. So strong is this impression that you could come away from a cursory view of the building, believing that this is all that it consists of.

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Arcus College

The new campus of the Arcus College in Heerlen, in the southeast Netherlands is a regional provider of vocational training for the Limburg province. It was designed, says architect IAA Architecten, “to meet the challenges of contemporary vocational education, anticipating future developments in this field and creating an optimised learning environment for a new generation of students”. 

Photography: Little Planet www.littleplanet.be

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ROC Carolus School

The first impression of the ROC Carolus building is deceptive, and deliberately so. Passers-by and visitors see a ‘crazy’ building, a fractured and playful facade, with irregularly polygonal windows breaking up the variety of shades of grey in the prepainted metal cladding that floats above a glazed ground floor. This cladding in turn has ‘fault lines’ along it, as if the whole could shatter in an instant. It takes a moment to realise that this is disguising the fact that the building in fact consists of relatively regular blocks joined by glazing. The overall assembly is largely rectilinear, but with one end curving to a point like the prow of a ship. Far from this being an example of unexplained exuberance, careful consideration has gone into making the facade, like the rest of the building, hard working and affordable.

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