Description

Located in one of the city’s shanty town suburbs, Jardin El Porvenir Kindergarten
seeks at once to raise community aspirations, provide sports facilities within
the neighbourhood whilst also creating a refuge for the children. The
kindergarten is based on a modular system that can adapt to both topographical
and urban situations. In this project, Mazzanti Arquitectos have created a
building as a symbol for urban regeneration and a boost for social change. The
significance of the boundary treatment is a key driver to the project. Much of
the plot of land in which the school is built remains open to the community,
creating a much-needed green lung to the dense urban grain of the shanty town.
The school buildings are wrapped in a ring of tall white angled columns that
form a sheltered colonnade, giving the school its striking identity. The
treatment of the wrap as a sculptural element erodes the negative connotations
of typical boundary conditions. The angled columns afford views into and out of
the play spaces reinforcing the link between community and school. Although the
school is secure, a continuous bench around the exterior of colonnade allows the
whole neighbourhood to come right up to the building perimeter and use the
benches, making the most of all the open space surrounding the school.

A single larger element housing the school hall breaks this ringed colonnade and
is in turn wrapped in a more angular screen that forms both a secure entrance
courtyard and gives access to the school hall. This outer courtyard means that
the local community can use the school hall without entering the main
educational spaces out of school hours. Within the ring, the classrooms are
created by a series of angled cubes. The interstitial space then creates a
sequence of play spaces, streets and sheltered wooded courtyards. The play
spaces adjacent to each class space are simple flat areas that are linked to the
architecture by the use of bold graphics and animated by light and shadows cast
by angled columns of the wrap.

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Originally published in: Prue Chiles (ed.), Leo Care, Howard Evans, Anna Holder, Claire Kemp, Building Schools: Key Issues for Contemporary Design, Birkhäuser, 2015.