Ring the bell, let’s hurry! Everyone inside, before the janitors close the school doors and the teachers close the classroom doors!

When we talk about doors, we certainly think of our homes, offices or stores, and hotels, but we hardly ever raise the issue of doors in schools, unless we are the school manager.

In this case, we would quickly realize that thinking about, designing, making, and providing doors in schools is a process that involves a number of very important aspects that go far beyond the aesthetic ones. What do we need to keep in mind so that when the time comes, we can choose the right door?

We were all students but none of us ever paid attention to the door we found ourselves opening and closing a thousand times. No one, probably, ever paid attention to how acoustically isolated it was from the outside at the time the teacher was explaining the lesson, nor whether it could be properly cleaned, let alone whether it was a door that could prevent any accidental injury.

Yet, these are precisely the requirements needed for a door to be called suitable for an educational institution: not only classrooms, but also offices, the cafeteria, the library, the gymnasium, not to mention the bathrooms, where it is necessary to ensure not only maximum daily hygiene, but also resistance to the most aggressive detergent that, invariably, will be used in the cleaning.

Raise your hand if you have ever dared to write your name or your girlfriend’s name, perhaps surrounded by hearts, on the doors of the school bathrooms, as if it might make our presence felt more: I have been here!

With the choice of a good door and a proper anti-graffiti treatment, today’s students will have to make do with walls (and, if full-height coated, will have to go back to sheets of paper…).

The excellent results, achieved through current technologies, show that it is possible to achieve products that are up to par with the battle that doors seem to have to fight on a daily basis with students and school staff.

A condensate of functionality, strength and robustness, sound insulation, hygiene and safety assurance, but not only that: who says that doors that meet these requirements cannot also be nice to look at?

Again, design and customization come into play: whether they are wooden or aluminum doors with laminate panels, whether they have rounded edges to avoid any accidents, whether they are equipped with panic bars or not to help people escape, school doors can also meet the best design standards without significantly affecting school budgets.

The factor of customization (patterns, colors, accessories, etc.) also comes into play for schools, which is very important, especially in view of a new mode of design that we are seeing more and more frequently: the school no longer as a mere succession of open areas on more or less wide corridors and common areas, but a real comfortable and pleasant environment in which to raise our children and young people.

A hint, in conclusion, of the guidelines issued by the Italian Ministry of Education at the beginning of May 2022 for the design of the 195 “innovative schools” to be implemented with the use of resources from the PNRR (“Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza”, Italy’s recovery and resilience plan): these are the main features for the school of the future “not only a place of education but also a social center and a garrison for the reference territory”.

With this in mind, in addition to sustainability, energy conservation,inclusiveness and quality, specific mention should be made of the “flexibility” highlighted in the decalogue:
in a vision that opens up a thousand new avenues for a design more attentive to the education of today’s young people, the school becomes an environment in which both the indoor and outdoor space are actively teaching environments, in strong synergy with each other.

Not only that, classrooms lose their boundaries in favor of a more flexible configuration, “a system that can accommodate different configurations and expand to neighboring spaces, depending on the teaching needs”.

A new challenge in the design of doors that will therefore have to allow division in individual classrooms by allowing, if necessary, the opening of spaces in the creation of shared learning environments, obviously without derogating from the technical features highlighted above.

It will be a new opportunity to demonstrate the high quality achieved in the process of devising and producing new and interesting solutions.