Wisperweide
A schoolyard at the heart of the neighbourhood.
Project Type: Schoolyard redesign, participatory design, play environments
Location: Weesp (Aetsveld), Amsterdam.
Year: 2024–26
Client: Circlewood, Talent Primare
Team: Daryl Mulvihill, Lola Cauneac, Joost van Haaster
Collaboration: Studio A Kwadraat, OMA, Gemeente Amsterdam
Wisperweide is the first school to complete under Amsterdam's Innovation Partnership School Buildings programme — a modular timber structure designed by Studio A Kwadraat, OMA and CircleWood to be flexible, circular and adaptable across its lifetime. Studio dmau was commissioned to design the schoolyard.
The building is designed around a central atrium. This informed our schoolyard concept: a series of spaces surrounded by green that work across all scale levels: from the neighbourhood, to the school, to the outdoor classroom.
All classrooms on the ground floor have a direct connection with the yard. The design caters for younger children with smaller play elements, a sandpit, and a playful secondary path that invites running and loops on trikes and bikes.
Working with children and residents from Aetsveld, we designed a landscape that turns outward: green axes connect the school to the surrounding streets, soft landforms and planted edges create sheltered niches for smaller groups and help manage water. All play spaces are surrounded by planting that changes with the seasons providing an enriching natural experience for the schoolchildren
Aetsveld is a 1980s neighbourhood, where the school and schoolyard was conceived as the heart of the community. Our design is the first phase of part of a larger redevelopment by Gemeente Amsterdam. Wisperweide is a step toward restoring the school as the heart of the neighbourhood.
