Description

Colombian architect Giancarlo Mazzanti built the Gerardo Molina School in a rapidly growing area on the north-western periphery of the city. As is usually the case in this kind of settlements, the area is densely built with self-constructed adjacent houses. There is little homogeneity in the neighbourhood because houses grow intermittently depending on the fluctuating income of each family – there is no labour stability among the residents of the area, so most families do not have regular earnings. The size of the existing houses varies from one to five storeys. There are also a few social housing blocks in the vicinity which contribute further to increasing population density. Although the programme given by the organisers of the competition called for the design of a school, there were numerous secondary demands, some of which were not included in the brief itself but arose after careful analysis of the site. For that reason, Mazzanti approached the design as if it were an urban planning project (rather than simply an isolated building) whose main purpose was to endow the growing neighbourhood with social, cultural and recreational facilities for the community. The architect saw the project as an opportunity to create what I have called a ‘contact zone’. In short, the school was designed to become a social space for the community in general rather than a traditional fortified school building which would repel people other than students.

To achieve this, the school was conceived as a continuous winding ribbon whose main elements, the classrooms, twist in response to the surrounding contexts, i.e. it curves inwards where the exiting streets meet perpendicularly the outer boundary of the school and outwards reaching towards existing constructions across the street. That way the building creates a variety of external spaces, public parks and squares that can be used permanently by the public, while simultaneously generating a heterogeneous courtyard inside the school for the use of students. Thus, the school generates spaces of different qualities: some are small, others are big; some are open while others are secluded.

Not dissimilar from the work of other famous Colombian modernist architects, such a Rogelio Salmona, the main functional areas of the programme (classrooms, offices, auditorium, etc.) take rectangular volumes which are distributed on the site and connected by a continuous covered circulation, whose roof is lower than that of the volumes. However, unlike Salmona whose courtyards adhered to a strict preconceived geometry – perfect squares or circles – Mazzanti’s design responds to the irregularity of the existing context. The circulation, then, absorbs the apparent disorderly distribution of classrooms making the entire composition look non-linear and more dynamic. Instead of brick – more typical for Colombian modernist buildings – Mazzanti uses stone for the external cladding of the main volumes. This natural material is durable and requires little maintenance. It also adds a corrugated texture with variations in tone and colour. Further, basic traditional materials such as concrete, metal, wood and glass are used.

A number of level variations, ramps, stairs and leaning columns contribute to exacerbate such dynamism. Furthermore, irregular wooden trellises delimit the circulation (and the rest of the building at floor level) permitting a visual link with the surrounding context. Trellises also cast shadows that change during the day reinforcing the sense of dynamism in conjunction with the winding circulation and the varying height of roofs.

The largest volume of the building is positioned on the north-western corner of the school facing an un-built site reserved for a park. The volume contains an auditorium and other multi-functional rooms which open towards the park and can be used by local residents for social gatherings. This volume appears to be the physical link between the school and the community.

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Originally published in: Felipe Hernández, Beyond Modernist Masters. Contemporary Architecture in Latin America, Birkhäuser, 2009.