PARIS — Fourth graders at the Saint-Charles school in Monaco are starting their school year in a unique classroom. Their new learning environment, imagined by designer Stéphanie Marin, features a reversible furniture system, which they are encouraged to assemble and deconstruct according to their activities, like life-sized building blocks.
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In addition to its playful aspect, this layout also has educational virtues: cooperation, coordination and awareness of one’s community. “Being able to reorganize space reinforces children’s sense of autonomy and responsibility,” says Marin, who has already experimented with her concept called Ecoletopie — a contraction of the French word “école” (school) and “utopie” (utopia) — in other places. This alternative is gaining traction among children and teachers alike, who see it as a concrete way to develop teaching methods.
Today, the dream of many designers is no longer to create a signature hotel or a landmark building but to reinvent schools. From Mathieu Lehanneur to Constance Guisset and Matali Crasset — one of the first to have designed a school, in the Brittany region in 2015 — they all want to find solutions to improve children’s living and learning spaces. Beyond a simple exercise in style, they aim to break with the rigidity of the classroom.
Spaces can transform behavior
“Our role is not anecdotal: designers are there to understand contemporary issues and synthesize needs, while taking into account budgetary constraints,” says Guisset, who created the space for children at the Paris Philharmonic Hall. At a time when schools are going through a crisis, designers are putting their expertise to good use. “I deeply believe that a space can transform behavior,” Guisset says.
Lehanneur, who designed the Paris Olympic torches and cauldron, says, “The way we work in companies has evolved considerably in recent years, so why shouldn’t it apply to schools?”
The time when children were required to remain seated most of the day is now over. “The classroom can no longer be a fixed and static place, it must leave room for informality, incorporate more notions of pleasure and comfort, and restore little individual intentions,” Lehanneur says.
From vision to concrete projects
Isabelle Vérilhac, development director at the Agency for the Promotion of Industrial Creation (APCI), says she has observed this reinvention taking place across France by designers working for local authorities. Their reflections have given rise to concrete projects.
Children need to move!
In the Gironde department in southwest France, MJ studio has transformed a middle school courtyard by creating spaces adapted to different profiles of adolescents, from quiet to sporty. Further north, in the Loire-Atlantique department, designer Pomme Monfort studied the issue of toilets in schools.
In the Val-d’Oise department, north of Paris, an innovative school garden project designed by the MWAH agency, exemplary in terms of environmental issues, will open in September 2025 in the town of Saint-Prix.
Children’s well-being
Designers’ interest in education is not new. At the beginning of the 20th century, the start of mass education and the renewal of teaching methods transformed schools. In France, reflections started with the creation of an open-air school in Suresnes (a western suburb of Paris), in the early 1930s. Eugène Beaudoin and Marcel Lods designed lightweight aluminum furniture that could be easily taken outdoors by children. A design that went hand in hand with the Montessori and Freinet alternative teaching methods.
Industrialization also had an impact on school furniture. Jean Prouvé, a metal enthusiast, experimented with mass-production as early as 1935, designing a two-seater desk with a folded sheet metal structure and wooden top for a school in the city of Metz.
Children’s well-being was also an issue in Scandinavia; in 1955, Denmark’s Arne Jacobsen equipped a school on the suburbs of Copenhagen with light and functional tubular steel furniture as aesthetic as it was practical. Reflecting the educational and economic trends of the time, these examples impose on children a fixed posture and the rigor that results from it.
The need to move
Today, educators and designers are rethinking movement and mobility in the classroom. Marin, for example, has imagined bouncy seats that allow children to change positions without disrupting the teacher’s lesson.
Intimate, informal areas where children can meet and confide.
For his part, Lehanneur advocates for chairs designed to rock slightly, like rocking chairs, saying “Children need to move, they all rock on their chairs, there is a reason behind that!” He also suggests creating areas in classrooms where children can let off steam and channel their energy, and — why not — installing punching bags in the back of the class.
Well-being is naturally part of the design specifications. With that in mind, Lehanneur also suggests optimizing hallways so they become intimate, informal areas where children can meet and confide. And Marin has planned “decanting” spaces, where children can isolate themselves to “put their thoughts in order and let go.”
Ecological issues
Just as it was in the 1950s, the choice of materials is linked to current issues. And the era of sustainable development has replaced that of industrialization.
Today, most schools order their furniture from a catalog. A few specialist manufacturers share the market and offer standard and cost-competitive products. To make these catalogues more in line with current educational and ecological issues, Guisset underlines the power of the French government (which regulates the country’s education system) to impose specific designs or collections.
“We can improve things with subtlety and lightness without necessarily wiping the slate clean of what already exists,” Lehanneur says. So, there is room for improvement.
