Rosan Bosch Studio designs nature based Garzón School in Uruguay for the age of AI

Set within a 94 acre rural landscape in Punta del Este, Uruguay, The Garzón School by Rosan Bosch Studio proposes a timely response to one of the most urgent questions in contemporary education: what kinds of spaces do children need in an age increasingly shaped by screens, artificial intelligence and digital acceleration?

Rather than treating architecture as a neutral container for teaching, the project understands the school as an active participant in the learning process. Here, space is not simply where education happens. It becomes part of how children think, move, observe, collaborate and form a relationship with the world around them.

Surrounded by eucalyptus forests, meadows and a lake, the campus is conceived through a simple but powerful idea: the school is the park, and the park is the school. This principle dissolves the conventional separation between classroom and landscape. Nature is not used as scenery or as an occasional outdoor activity. It is woven into the daily structure of learning.

The Garzón School invites children to learn indoors, outdoors and in the transitional spaces between the two. Pathways, plazas, vegetation, timber buildings and open air areas form a campus that encourages curiosity and movement throughout the day.

Instead of fixed classrooms and rigid corridors, Rosan Bosch Studio has created a flexible spatial framework that supports different ways of learning and being. Children can gather, retreat, present, make, play, observe and move through a sequence of settings that respond to varied emotional, social and cognitive needs.

The result is closer to a pedagogical landscape than to a conventional school building. Every part of the campus contributes to the experience of learning, from the sheltered interior spaces to the outdoor routes that connect them. Architecture becomes a tool for independence, encounter and discovery.

The campus is built entirely from sustainably sourced timber and finished with the traditional Japanese Shou Sugi Ban charring technique. The darkened timber surfaces give the buildings a tactile and durable presence while reinforcing the project’s commitment to material responsibility.

Native vegetation and brick plazas, inspired by local Uruguayan architecture, anchor the school in its cultural and ecological context. These elements prevent the campus from feeling like an abstract educational model imported onto the site. Instead, The Garzón School feels grounded in its landscape, climate and local building memory.

This balance between global educational thinking and local material identity is central to the project. The architecture is contemporary, but it does not separate itself from place. Its strength lies in the way it connects children to material, weather, vegetation, ground and sky.

At the heart of the project is Rosan Bosch Studio’s long standing belief that learning environments should support the full range of children’s development. The school is organised around six spatial typologies known as Learning Worlds: Mountain Top, Cave, Campfire, Watering Hole, Hands on and Movement.

Each of these worlds supports a different mode of learning. Mountain Top provides spaces for presentation, performance and focused communication. Cave creates quieter places for concentration, retreat and reflection. Campfire supports storytelling, dialogue and shared attention. Watering Hole encourages informal exchange and social learning. Hands on areas allow for experimentation, making and creative problem solving, while Movement spaces recognise the essential role of the body in children’s cognitive and emotional development.

Together, these spatial conditions reflect a broader shift in education. Children do not all learn in the same way, and meaningful learning rarely happens through one format alone. It moves between quiet focus and active exploration, between individual study and collective discovery, between structured instruction and open inquiry.

The Garzón School arrives at a moment when many educators, families and communities are reconsidering the place of digital tools in children’s lives. The project does not reject technology. Instead, it offers a necessary counterpoint to screen based education by foregrounding the physical, social and sensory dimensions of learning.

Children need places where they can touch materials, observe seasonal change, move freely, test ideas, collaborate face to face and build a meaningful relationship with the natural world. These experiences cannot be replaced by information access alone.

In this sense, the project expands the idea of what a school can be. Learning is not limited to the transfer of knowledge. It is emotional, physical, social and sensory. It happens through exploration, conversation, making, movement, silence, observation and play.

For Rosan Bosch Studio, The Garzón School continues a wider commitment to designing learning environments that motivate and empower students. Founded by Rosan Bosch in 2011, the studio works across architecture, interiors, landscapes and learning strategy, with offices in Copenhagen and Madrid.

The practice approaches educational spaces from the perspective of their users, engaging teachers and students in the development of new environments. Its work challenges the idea of the school as a standardised institution and instead proposes a richer model: a school as an ecosystem of experiences.

At The Garzón School, architecture becomes part of the curriculum. The landscape becomes a teacher. The campus invites children to ask questions, take initiative and participate actively in their own development.

By bringing together sustainable timber construction, local identity, nature based learning and a nuanced understanding of how children learn, the project demonstrates that educational spaces matter profoundly. A school can be more than classrooms, corridors and schedules. It can be a landscape of possibilities, a place where children do not simply attend school, but inhabit, explore and bring learning to life.

Project Credit

Project name: The Garzón School
Location: Punta del Este / Manantiales, Maldonado, Uruguay
Architecture: Rosan Bosch Studio / @rosanboschstudio
Photographer: Eleazar Cuadros
Area: 900 m²
Completion year: 2025