"Esplanade Elementary School – a postmodern, monumental school in Årstafältet" is Sanning Arkitekter's bachelor's degree project in architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The degree project is archived and retrievable through the DiVA portal (the Digital Scientific Archive) – the archive record is found here, and the project in full here (the page may need to be reloaded to start viewing of the document). Below is a short description of the project.

On Saturday May 26th, A.D. 2018, the ground work is initiated for one of our time’s most expansive housing projects. Årstafältet, a predominately natural park in southern Stockholm, will during the next twelve years be urbanized to two fifths of its total area, giving context for an entirely new urban quarter, accomodating 15 000 new Stockholmers. The scale of the housing project is comparable to the whole population of Nynäshamn, or one fifth of Kungsholmen’s.

The new zoning plan has the motto “a place for meetings”, and its main principle is “variation”. The zoning plan requests that the new buildings should be characterized by a variation in different heights, forms and styles. In accordance with the main principle of the zoning plan, and with the program of the degree project, we have designed a school building for 540 pupils in the ages of 10 to 16 years, which embodies a postmodern, eclectical approach, in uniting diverse architectural elements and inspiration from many different historical styles, and in the standpoint that the diversity of elements and physical environments is not subordinated to any one architectural principle. The school is in itself a place of meetings – between epochs, styles, materials and elements.

Esplanade Elementary School has been designed as a postmodern, monumental school, where the awesome dignity of knowledge, as well as the massive importance of the school as a societal institution, is fortified in the architecture’s monumentality. Esplanade Elementary School directs itself as a landmark and symbol to both old and new contexts in its urban vicinity, opening up its doors for the public in many aspects outside of school hours. It also aspires to offer its pupils physical environments which evoke their immersive interest and in its diversity allow for the phenomenological compatibility of equally diverse environmental preferences. The main elements which make up the directional essence of the interior environments are the Botanical atrium, the monumental spiral staircase and the Obelisk of Light, composed of hundreds of naturally and artificially lighted fresnel prisms.

Esplanade Elementary School – perspective from the atrium's winter garden, with study seats along the brick arcades.

Physical model in a scale of 1:200.

Site plan in a scale of 1:400 (original scale for A1).

Visualization of the new Årstafältet in the year of 2030 – with 3D models of the new buildings acquired from White Arkitekter and with the degree project's addition in red.

Elevation drawing from SE, in a scale of 1:400 (A3).

Elevation drawing from NW, in a scale of 1:400 (A3).