A Rooftop Classroom for Urban Agriculture in Paris

On the roof of a Parisian secondary school, rerum architectes has delivered an intervention that feels less like an extension than a precise recalibration. The existing rooftop playground already offered the essentials urban growers seek: a flat horizon, generous exposure, and the rare gift of open air in a dense city. What the project adds is not spectacle, but a readable system where cultivation and teaching can run side by side, each strengthening the other.

Rather than declare a single architectural statement, the design begins with a close reading of limits. Structure, weather, maintenance, and the rhythms of school life are treated as active ingredients. The result is an architecture that turns constraints into legibility, and legibility into a daily tool.

The ensemble is anchored by two new volumes: a greenhouse and an educational pavilion. They register as fraternal forms, alike in their structural discipline yet distinct in atmosphere. The greenhouse is wrapped in transparent polycarbonate, concentrating light and heat to support growth. The teaching space, by contrast, adopts a translucent skin that diffuses daylight into a softer, calmer register, closer to a studio than a classroom.

Both volumes rely on galvanized steel frames spanning wall to wall, a pragmatic strategy that preserves existing waterproofing while reinforcing the project’s careful economy. Read from the roof, these frames behave like infrastructural exoskeletons, making construction logic visible and arguing quietly for clarity over embellishment.

Around the built volumes, open planting zones unfold across raised beds and ground-level plots, composing a terrain designed to be worked, observed, and learned from. Here the project’s educational intention becomes explicit. Urban agriculture is not treated as a decorative rooftop garden, but as a working landscape shaped for use, repetition, and seasonal change.

The water cycle, often hidden behind ceilings and service shafts, is staged in plain sight. Rainwater is collected, stored, and redistributed through routes that remain visible to students. Potable and non-potable networks are distinguished and traced, turning irrigation and maintenance into a narrated experience. This is not an aesthetic of exposed pipes for its own sake. It places students inside systems, where ecological thinking begins with flows and consequences rather than symbols.

Ventilation completes the choreography. Roof openings regulated by thermosensitive mechanisms borrow the straightforward ingenuity of agricultural hothouses, reducing dependence on constant manual adjustment and avoiding the rigidity of heavy mechanical control. Along the façades, polycarbonate panels alternate between perforated and solid, modulating air movement and daylight to produce atmospheres that shift across the school year.

The rooftop climate is neither sealed nor passive. It is responsive, tuned to crops, weather, and occupation, an environment that breathes as it is used.

Project Credit

Project name: Rooftop Educational Farm
Design: rerum architectes
Year: 2025
Location: Paris, France
Photo: Mary Gaudin