IN 2019, GREEN SCHOOL FOUNDERS Michael and Rachel Perrett invited New Plymouth-based architecture practice Boon to design a learning hub for Year 1 to Year 13 students in Taranaki that followed the holistic Green School educational philosophy. The concept originated in Bali, where a school was opened in 2008 with the idea that cognitive function and emotional well-being could be enhanced through immersion in nature, hands-on projects and reality-based learning. Built using bamboo as the primary material, the Green School Bali was designed to be a school with no walls, dissolving the boundaries between inside and outside and provoking positive physiological responses from occupants through an immediate connection with nature.
Contemplating the variable weather systems (cue Neil Finn) across New Zealand – at times a wild mix of both subantarctic and subtropical – the neuro-architectural language of Green School Bali needed some clever translation and innovative thinking to
