Pre-School. Memory
The historic city of Avila is growing outwards to the southeast, and it is here, in the place of the ancient kitchen gardens which used to surround the Royal Monastery of Santo Tomás, that the plot of land is to be found where the project is located. The plot of land has seen a series of different buildings for educational purposes over the last twenty years, but with no prior overall plan. The site assigned for our project is the south-easternmost corner of the plot, which had previously been filled in so that it could serve as a playground for the first primary schools here.
Bearing in mind the kind of site described, and that we chose to develop the building on one floor only, the generative idea behind the project shows itself in the articulation of the different spaces, which aim on the one hand to be south facing and on the other to achieve a direct and simple relationship with the outside. On this basis, filled and empty spaces have been originated on the site, taking shape in the form of the zones of classrooms, with the spaces being conceived a priori in the following way: the filled spaces are recipients for light and colour, and the empty spaces and the playgrounds are spaces which are densified by all the materials which surround them.
The building is made up of five pieces which alternate with the individual playgrounds which are created by each one of these pieces. They are cube-shaped pieces, extruded, in acknowledgement to the Renaissance architectural styles of the Monastery. These pieces, as well as being directly involved in making the building south-facing, by means of the access to each of their playgrounds, also aim to create the zenithal illuminations which will counteract the contrasts in light, and to achieve in the inside of the classrooms a great homogeneity in the natural light for each one of the pieces. Where required, there are vertical skylights, which the different spaces generate and fold.
The centre´s programme evolves with a first zone for administration; a second part is the location for the double classroom for children from new-borns up to one year old; directly after that is a third part which serves as a multi-purpose hall; in the fourth zone of building are the dining room and the kitchens, and finally is the most extruded part, where there are six classrooms for children from the ages of one to three years. The various playgrounds are specialized and individual to each one of the buildings, and there is a larger general playground which is related to the buildings previous to this project, and to the most singular topographical feature of the zone, which is the granite boulder known as the “Piedra Machucana” (roughly speaking, the “Crushing Stone”).
In terms of construction, we wanted the building to be very unimposing from the outside, and to this end only two materials have been used. The opaque areas have been coated with panels of pre-patinaed zinc (sections 260mm wide), and the open zones have been coated with different types of glass: transparent, translucent, pieces of cast glass (260mm wide), translucent and transparent insulating materials within the chambers formed by the cast glass. The final result is a series of black-coloured planes and other planes with different tonalities of white, depending on the presence and intensity of the light.
Inside, in contrast, are to be found spaces with different qualities of colour, which are achieved by lacquering the carpentry work and the different coloured ceramic surfaces. The spaces to be moved through have been conceived so that the children have different visual relationships with the outside; likewise the upper parts of the classrooms are marked off according to their scale with hanging lighting systems.
The ground surfaces of the playgrounds are a folded-down and flattened continuation of the building itself, and zones are created which are hard, semi-hard, and soft, in keeping with the different uses to which the children will put these outside zones, which are a prolongation of the classrooms.