The Arcosur neighborhood, where this school by Magén Arquitectos is located, is still under development. This presented two very different scenarios: on the one hand, it allowed certain creative freedom to set the pace for future development, while on the other, it presented the challenge of transforming a harsh environment into an inhabitable space.
As a result of this, the building shields itself from its surroundings with a playful, metal-clad exterior, and opens itself towards the central courtyard and the small internal outdoor spaces. The courtyard cloisterlike perimeter provides shade and protects circulation leading to the classroms, and its inward sloped roof resembles Roman impluviums.
The school's classrooms are based on a 9x7.2 meters module, with each volume rising along one of the corners where a skylight fills the space with natural light and, together with the courtyard-facing windows, provides cross ventilation. This solution extends to other interior spaces like the psychomotricity room and the dining hall.
Project description by Magén Arquitectos
The neighborhood of Arcosur is the last residential expansion towards the south of Zaragoza. The building is located on one of the structuring axes of the area, and it is the first public facility completed there, so these new aspects together give the building a particularlry important urban dimension. The area is still under development, so though the urban program is completed, the overall image appears to be closer to the territorial scale of the city edges than to the density of the residenctial fabric foreseen.
The absence of urban references gives the project design a certain autonomy based on its functional conditions and on the dual attention to the domestic scale of the child and to the public scale of the intervention. The objective is to transform a harsh site into an inhabitable space, creating a place that adapts to children, built with their own geometric, volumetric and spatial references.
The school program – including dining rooom – arranges nine rooms around the main playground. Along the perimeter of the building, between the volume and the streets around it, long courtyards bring light and ventilation into all the spaces and circulation areas, spanning the different heights of the terrain. Both the central courtyard and that of access are defined by a perimeter porch with a sloping roof, a sort of impluvium, which creates an intermediate space to shelter and connect the different exits and accesses.
Addressing the educational program and the building schedule, the construction is systematized from a rectangular module of 9x7.2 meters with an area of 60 square meters. The volume rises along one of the corners to improve lighting and acoustics in the classrooms with a sloping, phonoabsorbent ceiling, with a skylight-window at the highest point to distribute light evenly. Besides, the opposite position of the openings favors cross ventilation. The volumetric section of the classrooms extends like a skylight to the main spaces of the program: psychomotricity room and dining room.
On the outside, the building is characterized by the presence of these metallic volumes over the roof surface, and by the contrast between the sriated concrete panel finish onto the street and the timber stratified panels towards the interior courtyards. The use of different textures for the courtyard pavements is meant to enhance the child`s learning experience.
