kindergarten in Vereda de Estudiantes - Rueda Pizarro Arquitectos

To think about a nursery school involves attending a complex duality of scales. And involves to create a space where live very different perceptions together: teachers and children who are developing their cognitive abilities. Therefore, few buildings have the capacity to be formative spaces.

Parallelism with the famous novel “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll is immediate. It transports us to a world of mixed feelings where imagination and reality, work and play, fun and responsibility are combined. A world of sensations, experiences, sets of scales and color are perceived by the eyes of children, coexisting with adults, making necessary to use a dual scale adapted to each of them. But not only the scale must be adapted, also the space perception. Due to this reason, we consider essential thinking from inside the building. First of all, the central space works as a public space covered where you can access to all classrooms. It is a smooth space with items that enhance visual and tactile perception: the circular courtyard, that introduces outside to inside; the deep cover skylights larger than 2 meters of height that introduce a world of color; the access to the classrooms with partitions unfolded and deep windows that work as a individual spaces and allow to the children enter inside. These are resources that enhance haptic space against a purely visual space.

Therefore there is an absence of elevations and we choose the circular figure where prevailing a space conceived topologically. This decision also allowed to adapt the area required to a triangular plot very difficult to utilize. And this allowed another key resource: to resolve a bad orientation where the school itself cast shadow on the playground. Due to this, we placed the playground on the deck. The access becomes a play to introduce children in a vertical passage that ascends slowly, a ramp that runs along the perimeter of exempt cylinder that contains school facilities.

The layout of the program inside the school attends to circulation and orientation criteria. The classrooms are located in the southeast to get the most sunlight. The administration, offices and facilities are located in the northwest where movement and access are independent. The main space is the great central hall, a covered meeting space for children’s events that allows direct access to all classrooms.