+Jeito

Myrna J, Samiksha Gadodia, Divya Dharshni, Krish Desai
JEITINHO BRASILEIRO – to find a way – is a term that describes the Brazilian tendency to find creative ways around challenges.

A Casa de Itaim Bibi

Sara Albayyari, Jina Sirriyeh, Sara Yaish, Mirag Safi
A CASA DE ITAIM BIBI is a 24‑hour community learning hub in São Paulo, inspired by the Indigenous Maloca, uniting education, housing, work, and civic life into a shared, lifelong right.

A City Within

Majed Ibrahim, Marwa Omar, Noha ElAttar
The school becomes a vertical extension of the city where streets turn into learning spaces and public life continues inside. A porous civic structure connects education and community, transforming the building into a living urban ecosystem.

A Civic Passage

Samia Noaman, Wissam Ayman, Seif Ghobrial
The Civic Passage turns the school into a public spine, connecting streets, programs, and communities, transforming circulation into shared learning space and flexible civic hub from ground floor to rooftop.

A Cozinha

Ahmed Zaki, Abdullah Ashraf, antony ibrahim, Amr Gamal
A Cozinha reimagines the public school as a vertical civic anchor in Itaim Bibi, São Paulo, replacing traditional classrooms with shared learning platforms. Centered on a communal kitchen atrium, it links education, culture, and food through day‑to‑night use as a school, public kitchen, market, and gathering space.

A Parade of Pedagogy

Tamilselvan Ezhilmaran, Bharath Gopalakrishnan

Learning+ that dances like in a carnival parade , from day to night and from summer to winter. A new academia for every students of different community.

ABCs A Beautiful Community School

Josh Fisher, Diana Perez, Reza Takallouie, Tyrone Marshall
This project reimagines the urban school as vertical civic infrastructure—a 10‑story mass timber learning landscape serving students and community. Through biophilic design, natural light, and carefully crafted spaces, it nurtures well‑being, curiosity, and focus, placing beauty and nature at the heart of learning.

Agentes da Alegria

Angelina Zhang, Lizzy Dame, Mariama Kah, Navya Raju
This school sees creativity as civic power, existing not to train workers but to cultivate self‑actualized humans. Students grow confident, curious, and resilient, able to understand systems, collaborate meaningfully, and engage their community—beginning and ending their learning journey with joy.

Água de Beber

Aram Guzman, Marlen Lopez, Derrick Tang, Elijah Montez

São Paulo built its future on a river it forgot. This school returns to it. The Pinheiros is both wound and teacher — a record of what was sacrificed, and the beginning of a different education: one that believes Brazil’s leadership in the world flows not from the conquest of nature, but from a generation learning, in communion with land and water, to repair what their city left behind.

Beyond the Bell | Além do Sinal

Lily Zhao, Maggie Lee
From Brazil’s dual-shift public school reality to a 24-hour civic learning ecosystem for everyone.

Block Party

Dominic Blindert, Madelaine Murray, Tom Godinez, Elliot Langejans

In a district defined by office towers, exclusive education and private amenities, The Block Party reimagines Itaim Bibi as a catalyst for knowledge exchange through its radical, yet simple vertical public commons. The project’s stacked massing recalls the simplicity of building blocks, expressing education as incremental, foundational, and collectively constructed over time.

Building Blocks

Paola Hanna, Marie Christine Dimitri

Between child and adult, space breathes, connection, and imagination unfold. A threshold of generations where walls fade and worlds are shared. Here, play shapes space, and connection turns footsteps into stories.

Casa Commune

Ninoshka Menezes, Sweta Haldar, Lokesh Cheripally, Varsha Padmanabhan

Casa Commune is not a school you enter, it is a city you climb. A vertical public square where learning spirals upward, play becomes infrastructure, and the ground belongs to everyone. When the building lifts, the community rises with it.

Chão Comum

Neha Rampuria, Maithili Awasarikar, David Asokeji, Octavia Pinckney

Chão Comum is a radically transparent community hub that dissolves social barriers by integrating public urban life with holistic, 24/7 learning. It heals the urban fabric through bioclimatic design, providing a shared sanctuary where students, neighbors, and educators thrive together.

Circuito

Corey Phelps, Joshua Gripton, Jeff Moisant, Lin Chew

CIRCUTIO is a vertically organized school model built on data-informed feedback and inter-collegial mentorship. Supported by a self-sustaining AI infrastructure and a malleable ground plane, it operates as a subject-specific knowledge repository, a living pedagogical data model, and a civic anchor.

Convivência

Hailey Mulvey, Lisa LoGiudice, Tricia Gittings, Penelope Park
Rooted in Brazil’s concept of Convivência, this project transforms shared existence across generations into architecture. As an early education center and lifelong civic hub, it creates spaces where communities connect, sustain cultural memory, and continuously shape—and return to—their collective foundations.

Dopamine House

Abeer Mahmoud, Arunkumar Mariappan, Soni Johnson

THE DOPAMINE HOUSE: Itiam Bibi > “Reimagining the school as a living civic platform. By gamifying participation, we turn the act of learning into a visible neighborhood catalyst.”

El Verdebra

Nadia Abu Jbarah, Sanad Tell

El Verdebra lifts the traditional school to liberate a porous public stage for São Paulo’s street culture. A reinterpretation of the city’s brutalist heritage as a vibrant green monolith; a resilient shell where education and civic life seamlessly merge.

Enlightment

Sofia Bojorquez, Valeria Salazar, Jacqueline Beltran Palomares

Enlightment is a civic-educational threshold in Itaim Bibi that balances São Paulo’s urban intensity with spaces for pause, reflection, and collective learning. It recognizes that true learning is a biological process, one that requires a deliberate equilibrium between activation and rest.

Enroute

Himshikhar Himshikhar, Salman Haider

The building embodies a continuous architectural journey that elevates learning within a postmodern context.

Entre Telhados e Trilhas

Ryan Sison, Nicole Yip, Isa Branas, Kig Veerasunthorn
This proposal reimagines Itaim Bibi as a community‑anchored educational network embedded in the neighborhood’s social and economic fabric. Through a civic hub, rooftop activation, partnerships with local businesses, and an elevated green pathway, it creates reciprocal spaces where education, commerce, and community life reinforce one another.

Escola da Rua: School of the Streets

Sayed Salahuddin, Dhruv Krishnan, Aniket Sonawane, Dheeraj Rathod
The project centers on a continuous vertical street that replaces the traditional corridor and classroom. Formed by a two‑lane ramp, it weaves through every level—balancing efficient movement with moments of pause—so circulation and learning merge into a single, integrated spatial experience.

Escola do Pertencimento

Ahmed Ashraf, Mostafa El-Bessy, Mostafa Zahran

Escola do Pertencimento is a vertical pedagogy of belonging, empowering the underprivileged in a post-AI era by shifting education from content delivery to human capital development.

Escolaviva

Zeyad Ali, Hagar Elsrougy, Dena Ragab

Escolaviva reimagines the school as a vertical civic promenade in which learning unfolds through section rather than plan. By stacking public life, culture, wellness, and academic space along a continuous upward journey, the building transforms circulation into pedagogy and the city itself into a classroom.

Espaço Potência

Olivia Harris, Krystofer Pinnock, Laura Garcia, Darius Magada-Ward

Located in São Paulo, where gender-based violence and economic disparity disproportionately impact women, this project proposes a public all-girls STEAM academy integrated with a community resource center as an architectural response to systemic inequity.

Farm to the Long Table

Lucy Kim, Stephanie Tong
The project positions food as a universal connector, addressing urban food insecurity by integrating a vertical farm with K–12 learning and community spaces. A continuous vertical Long Table unifies cultivation, education, and gathering, framing the building as a shared ecosystem of exchange, resilience, and nourishment.

Gambiarra

Georgy Karpenko, Ross Dowd, Rain Chan

A vertical framework of adaptable learning modules that expands how children learn & opens its creative infrastructure to the city.

Gro[w]ve

Isaiah Lee, Andrew Bernard
GRO[W]VE balances stable public spaces with flexible private learning environments, fostering consistent neighborhood engagement while supporting adaptable education. Fixed civic programs like the theater and library anchor the building, while playful, adjustable classrooms connect into them, accommodating varied ages, activities, and teaching styles.

Human Nurture

Anna von Euw, Megan Stenftenagel, Gabriella Poncet, Bryce Stanger

‘HUMAN NURTURE’ celebrates learning grounded in human-centered connection within a tech-driven densifying environment to reconnect youth, the aging population and the working adult in a way that nurtures sensory-based interaction and fosters a strong sense of identity and belonging in a growing and changing world.

Ibirapuera No Ar

Boyu Hu, Kaikang Shen, Jessica Guimaraes

Ibirapuera no ar reimagines the spatial logic of Parque Ibirapuera as a vertical public landscape, where education and civic life are layered within a single structure. In one of São Paulo’s densest neighborhoods, the school becomes elevated terrain — a place where learning, culture, and community rise together.

Imaginação – A Cognitive Journey

Mariam Khadrawi, Soad Shahin, Logaina Fathalla, Engy Eldamarawy

IMAGINAÇÃO responds to São Paulo’s intensity and density by structuring the school as a cognitive journey through five stages of imagination; Curiosity, Exploration, Experimentation, Reflection, and Expression. Translating the neurological process of creativity into space, the project guides ideas from internalized wonder to a collective, public release, transforming imagination into an active urban force.

In Clouds We Belong

Qiyang Xu, Yubo Ji

Learning is inseparable from the city—it happens in streets, plazas, and public life as much as in classrooms. This project makes education civic, suspending collaborative learning pods within a vertical framework that connects students, teachers, and the public in continuous, shared experience.

Intellect in Common

Karthick Muthumalai, Niranjan Kannathasan, mohamed irfan, Gajesh kumar Ravikumar

This Learning+ school provokes intellectual curiosity by merging culture, community, and technology within a vertical civic ecosystem. Every space is designed to stimulate thought, cultural exchange, and intergenerational learning—transforming the school into a living cultural engine.

Ive

Hazem Abdulkariem, Ahmed Fayed, Magdy Mekawy
Located in São Paulo’s fast‑growing Itaim Bibi district, the project introduces the area’s first bicycle–pedestrian cross passage to reduce congestion and car dependency. Integrating exhibition space and a flexible community hall, it transforms mobility infrastructure into a social connector supporting sustainability, education, and neighborhood engagement.

Jeitinho

Kelsey Mitchell, Sean Spencer, Jett Misuraca, Evanthia Constantinou
This project combines education, housing, and community infrastructure into a vertical learning ecosystem linking school, home, and city. K–12 education is supported by shared civic amenities, circular sustainability systems, intergenerational housing, and vocational pathways—embedding choice, collaboration, and stewardship into daily life and learning.

Kaleidoscope Of Voices

Sakshi Kedia, Sumit Sharma, Vishal Laghate

Like a kaleidoscope, the school unites diverse voices, histories, and talents into one dynamic, evolving community. It is not just a building, but an open civic framework where transparency, connection, and shared participation shape collective learning.

Keep It Street

Helena Christensen, Jingping Lu, Mustafa Erkus

Keep It Street carries this educational shift beyond the building, reclaiming the city as a living classroom in the age of AI. As learning returns to the power of interaction, it calls for civic acts of learning that can transform everyday encounters into a reawakening of the street level of Itaim Bibi.

Keep Playing

Mouna Lawrence, Johanna Thiger, Thao Truong, Allyson Holley

The School of Play is a creative learning environment working in parallel with the emergence of technology integrated with daily life, where students are driven by curiosity and joy. This K-12 program is an homage to the doll house, a small-scale world that transcends identity and culture, children can mimic, react, communicate and create.

La Feria

Josh Padgett, Amir Heydarpour

In Brazilian culture, the open-air street fair—La Feria—is more than a marketplace; it is a vibrant social ecosystem where communities exchange knowledge, traditions, and lived experience. Reimagined as a new model for a new school, the feria becomes a community-embedded classroom that grounds learning in real-world participation, intergenerational exchange, and everyday life.

Learning In Between

Abubakr Bajaman, Nicole Leng, William Guinane

This unconventional Kindergarten to 6th grade school reimagines education by dissolving traditional boundaries. Driven by the concept of learning in the “between” spaces, the project integrates student education with shared civic engagement, transforming the campus from an isolated institution into a porous, 24-hour civic hub.

Learning+ A Vertical Civic Anchor

Mhammad Zein Al Chidiac, Ibrahim Alaywan
LEARNING+ reimagines the public school as vertical civic infrastructure embedded in the city. Layered programs, street‑level learning kiosks, and ascending academic spaces form a compact educational ecosystem, unified by a civic canopy and Brutalist principles of structural clarity, material honesty, and public generosity—supporting a visible, 24‑hour culture of learning.

LinkPlus+

Lana Muhtaseb, lujain ghannam, Ahmad Turani, tarq alrashdan

LINKPLUS+ transforms the school into a living urban platform that dissolves the boundary between education and the city, activating learning as a shared, public experience. By connecting Gen Beta’s digital fluency with Gen X’s lived wisdom, the project creates a knowledge infrastructure where generations co-evolve through collaboration, technology, and community.

Mão Dada | Hand in Hand: The City as Classroom

Swapnil Porkute, Mahek Ubhrani, Shrutika lakhe, Wahid Devra

We propose a vertical learning exchange in Itaim Bibi that transforms commerce into curriculum and redefines education as civic infrastructure. By embedding live workshops within an academically structured environment, the building becomes economically self-sustaining, socially integrated, and centered on collective growth — because no one moves forward alone.

Meet Me on the Stairs

Nicolas Pinzon, Yuanxun Xia

Meet Me on the Stairs” replaces the rigid “Banking Model” with a replicable vertical strategy that transforms compact footprints into a porous, 24-hour stage for transpedagogical dialogue.

Mode:On

Wei Cai, Yixuan Cai

Through research on contemporary learning paradigms, traditional social roles are reinterpreted and projected into five future-oriented learning identities. These roles are no longer defined by profession or age, but emerge as behavioral prototypes shaped by technological transformation and evolving modes of social collaboration. Together, they construct the organizational logic of space and reshape the structures of learning and social interaction.

Nested Agora

Veronica Paulon, Saba Abdolshahi, Ariel Morales-Pearson

Nested Agora is a day-and-night school that reimagines the conventional layout of educational facilities, organizing learning into four concentric categories engagement, observation, creation, and listening. In typical shared buildings, civic functions are often pushed to the periphery. Nested Agora flips this paradigm: flexible spaces adapt to the city’s daily rhythms—morning, afternoon, and after office hours—inviting the public to occupy and activate central, prime areas.

Not So School

Mrinalini Salvi, Gaurav Patankar, Akash Jagtap, Milland Mohanta

Two parallel lines — School and Society. Do they remain apart, or do they meet? Through shifting perspective, the architecture becomes their point of convergence — a civic ground where learning and public life intersect.

Núcleo

Vivek Manoj, Aravind Parambil, Abhijith V.S, Muhamed Sabin

From missionary learning roots to ecological and social imbalance, São Paulo’s declining Tiete river mirrors the rise of inequality in education. Núcleo re-centers learning as an open, inclusive force, where AI, climate awareness, and equity restore both the river’s ecology and society’s balance.