Snøhetta Turns Six Le Rosey Rooms Into Learning Experiments

Six rooms with barely a parallel wall between them — that was Snøhetta's starting point at Le Rosey, Switzerland's oldest and largest boarding school. The firm, working with Italian interiors specialist barth, has converted six irregular spaces at the Rolle campus into environments designed around six distinct ways of learning.

Founded in 1880, Le Rosey hosts 450 students from more than 70 countries and has long traded on progressive pedagogy. The new rooms sit within the school's Impact Space, an environment the school created to nurture entrepreneurial thinking and, in its own words, "encourage meaningful contributions to the wider world." Each room carries its own name, color palette, textures and furniture arrangement.

This is not a traditional classroom. Nor will it host conventional lessons.

What are the six rooms?

The Knowledge Room comes first. Inspired by a forest and centered on self-directed discovery, it is dotted with inclined, tree-like columns that carry bookshelves, seating and displays on cantilevered platforms.

The Actis Virtus Room reimagines the Harkness method — learning through discussion on equal terms. A large oval table dominates, while an overhead structure mirrors the table's shape, integrates lighting and supports seats that hang like swings.

The rest of the lineup:

• Rooted in Peace Room — draws on a Japanese tea house to encourage introspection
• Reflection Room — mirrored surfaces return distorted images, inviting users to look beyond tangible reality
• Curiosity Room — an S-shaped curtain system plays with privacy, revealing and concealing areas
• Unafraid to Be Room — a small, immersive amphitheater for practicing public speaking

How did they build it?

The original rooms were structurally irregular, with almost no parallel walls. barth engineered, manufactured and installed the custom joinery for each space, taking responsibility for nearly all the custom-built interior elements. That flexibility, per the project's account, allowed an abstract creative idea to become a tangible project.

Each room demanded its own technical solution. In the Knowledge Room, surfaces had to withstand substantial loads while appearing exceptionally light. In the Actis Virtus Room, the suspended chairs were a feat of design. In the Curiosity Room, extensive technical coordination supported heavy fabric from only a few attachment points.

The hardest brief was the Unafraid to Be Room. Its concept hinged on a fully immersive orange landscape, which meant transitions between materials had to be imperceptible and construction elements concealed. Snøhetta and barth produced a continuous surface that flows through the room without obvious interruptions. An all-orange world for teenagers to practice speeches in. One trusts they asked for it.

Why does it matter?

The school frames the project as proof of its commitment to creativity, collaboration and discovery as learning methods. The architects and barth describe a process in which innovation and lateral thinking were essential to resolving the unforeseen challenges the original spaces posed — finding, as they put it, "innovative solutions to bring the products of Snøhetta's imagination to life."

The wager here is that the setting shapes what happens within it. A school that charges boarding-school premiums at Europe's most famous institution can afford to test that theory on six rooms at a time. If the forest columns and swinging seats produce the entrepreneurial graduates Le Rosey wants, expect the photocopied classroom — the one most of us sat in — to look increasingly like a museum piece.

Photography by Tobias Kaser.

Project info

• Project: Le Rosey educational spaces
• Architect: Snøhetta
• Company: barth (@barth.interiors)