MAGAZINE ARQ 56 Education

Readings | Works and Project | Essays and Documents | Nexus

Social orthopedia / Mauricio Baros
Education at the turn of the century / Malva Villalón
School building exteriors / Tomás Browne
Architecture as a way of recreating and building a world is rarely so eloquent. For a child, school is his first sight of the society beyond the walls of his house, and it thus becomes the inaugural model of his relationships outside the family. Sánchez Ferlosio understood it as the citizen’s entry into the public, impersonal world, that systematically pits him against others in his first and lasting experience of civilization. What is happening today to the spaces for education as socialization? Has the family invaded the social territory of the school? How does architecture reflect the changes in an education that moulds itself increasingly to the individuality of each student?
At a time when the roles of parent and teacher have been redefined, it is worth asking if schools alone must fulfill the task of educating. The continuity the process requires suggests the city, which is a school in itself – open, public, transparent.

Juan de Dios Aldea School, Santiago, Chile / García + Aguiló + Arteaga + Pedraza
On the outskirts of Santiago the school buildings still stand out in the dense homogeneous tissue of houses and yards. This school is installed in La Pintana, but it does not stick out like a monument in the neighborhood. Instead it acts as an integrating element between two sectors, through a corridor and a series of buildings planned for open use by the whole community.

Public Library , Madrid, Spain / Mansilla + Tuñón arquitectos
Education is commonly thought of as happening only in school buildings, but this project, developed by a Chilean architect and winner of an architectural competition, is a bid to make the street a space for a community library. The plan for Artistas Street is to give back the public a leading role, by converting the street from a throughway to a place to be in and to share, where things are cared for because they are lived. An existing path and a small terrace were the starting points for reading rooms, light shafts and a café where children and adults can meet and practice urbanity.

Basic schools, Santiago, Chile / Undurraga & Devés arquitectos
The buildings shown form part of the expansion plan of a charity institution linked to Chile’s Ministry of Education. The location of the two schools means they create new centers and meeting places within their extensive site, as they re-orient the group of pre-existing buildings, and generate new relationships with the open spaces and the materials of the whole.

Duoc U.C., Santiago, Chile / Sabbagh arquitectos
So the outskirts are not city, are not urbane? DUOC’s building in La Florida, built over the parking lot of the biggest-selling mall in Santiago, breaks with many assumptions about the new neighborhoods. In a dense, hybrid, fast-changing setting, a place where pedestrians, cars, department stores, apartment blocks and leisure centers rub shoulders, the project takes its measure and comes up with solutions that aim at flexibility and inter-change. The location, dismountable construction, and the keynote final floor rising from the flat roof suggest a possible way forward for modern-day city living.

Alicante del Rosal School / Moreno arquitectos
The changes brought by Chile’s educational reforms from 1996 onwards (a longer school day, an Internet-based national support system, and new building regulations), have affected the physical structure of the schools. In this school, the need for a covered courtyard re-orders the relationships among external spaces, where playground, covered yard and central patio form a continuum, through which the building interior opens to the distant landscape.

SENAME Studio / Fernando García Huidobro + Diego Torres
The commitment to equal opportunities and access to education for all children is very apparent in organizations like SENAME, the national service for children and young people. A workshop at the Faculty of Architecture of the Catholic University took up the issue and proposed changes to the institution’s existing buildings. The project shown here builds a topography like a little world for the children living there.

Two Schools, Chile / Cristián Valdés
Sensitive economics. Two buildings, put up on dissimilar sites, 30 years apart, share a certain humility, a scale and some issues, like limited yards, covered exteriors, and precise, autonomous volumes. Both projects are imbued with a structural clarity that has the generosity to foresee changes of program and needs, so the school can also house community celebrations, parties and public meetings.

Monseñor E. Alvear School, Santiago, Chile / Gubbins arquitectos
Set in a conflictive marginal neighborhood of Santiago, this project has avoided taking a defensive stance. Instead, an open square, a transparent access, and elements that integrate with the streets, like the play grounds and a community center, activate the relationship between community and school. The school building is not a student cloister, it is a meeting place for the community.

Franche Comté University, Montbéliard, France / Carlos Jullian
The client’s long-term perspective has made it possible to implement this university campus project over a period of 15 years. That same confident perspective has given the city a public square that is also the central space of the university; in the relationship between the institution and its city there is a clear commitment that goes beyond what happens in classrooms, laboratories and library.

Contemporary architecture at the infant italian colonies / Stefano de Martino
Italy’s fascist regime understood architecture’s ability to communicate, as well as its power as a constructed, tangible fact. These children’s summer camps, part of a plan to combine indoctrination, health and education, were also a way of colonizing and extending sovereignty in distant territory. They were also a training ground for the young architects commissioned to build them, minor creations in the regime’s program of works.

Alvar Aalto: Practice and thought / Nicholas Ray
Figurative or abstract? Organic or mechanical? Local or international? The comfortable bi-polarity of much of the 20th century is giving way to sharper reflections, which see culture as a complex, hybrid tissue. Ray gives a reading of the work of Alvar Aalto that raises questions about the disciplinary relationship between thought and execution, but is constantly articulated by the reading of the buildings. Before architecture come the works of architecture.

ELEMENTAL Architecture world competition / Text: Pablo Allard
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile + FONDEF-CONICYT + MINVU Government of Chile
ELEMENTAL professional winners:
BOG arquitectos, Barcelona, Spain
Office dA, Boston, U.S.A.
Pasel & Kunzel, Rotterdam, Holand
Fernández + Hernández + Labbé, Santiago, Chile
ONA arquitectes, Barcelona, Spain - Concepción, Chile
Baptista & Equipo, Montevideo, Uruguay
Makowsky, Dojc & Rosas, Caracas, Venezuela