A team of two architects has created a
classroom module to deliver Medellín’s new kindergartens. The first
completed pair show the system’s potential for variety and sensitivity
to context. Medellín in Colombia is crossed by most of the great planetary
issues: inequity, misery, war, drugs, arms trafficking, forced
displacement, ecological instability and life in the favelas. It is a
city with plenty of green, but physically and socially segregated, and
arranged to favour vehicular traffic rather than pedestrians. This is
why it is the perfect place to practise social initiatives of all types.
Historically, in Medellín it has been easy to take advantage of crises: it has often
been difficult to discriminate between real attempts to relieve
problems, simple broken promises and unconsidered exploitation.
Nevertheless, and thanks to the previous two mayors (Sergio Fajardo,
2004-2007, and Alonso Salazar, 2008-2011) it is true to say today’s city
is not only a complex social laboratory, but a territory for
architectural and urban experimentation too.
Under Fajardo’s and Salazar’s leadership, Medellín invested most of its
budget in programmes and projects in the poor, informal and peripheral
neighbourhoods of the city’s mountains. Systematic physical
interventions (library parks, schools, sports grounds, urban walkways
and so on) have eased poverty, inequity and lack of opportunities for
decent housing, public space and educational environments.
Medellín has designed and built this collection of public
architecture through a double strategy: strengthening the Empresa de
Desarrollo Urbano (EDU), the office of urban development; and with a
policy of public calls for projects.
The first is disposed to
manage, improve and reform the existing city and to agree on new
projects with communities; the second is to guarantee quality
architecture within new infrastructures. This dual strategy has been so
successful that it has set a benchmark nationally and for other
developing countries accustomed to underestimating architecture’s
potential to effect social change.
Over the past eight years,
Medellín has carried out experiments, with good and bad results, but
above all it has accomplished trials. These efforts have gained the
support of sister cities that suffer similar problems, and the successes
have been replicated. And while programmes such as the library park are
now repeated in Brazil, the city continues to try out new ideas. Such
an initiative − and the subject of this article − is one of Salazar’s
principal projects: A Good Start.
This involves building high-quality kindergartens that − instead of
weakening informal neighbourhoods; instead of creating a tabula rasa and
enforcing social and urban cleansing; and instead of forcing people to
move continuously to find basic services − actually strengthen public
structures and the presence of the municipality. Integrating pre-school
education at a fundamental and familial level, they employ and train
local mothers and turn them into qualified teachers. The kindergartens
provide buildings and community services that solve problems for local
people.
The kindergartens serve children from birth to the age of
five. They are built in the mountains around the valley, where the
mothers − most of whom are single parents, heads of families, or young
widows − go to work in the daytime. Before the kindergartens were built,
the children would have been left with their grandmothers or
neighbours. Designed for some of the most vulnerable children in the
city, the Good Start initiative not only coordinates institutions as
educational centres but also as places where good nutrition and health
are guaranteed.
The kindergarten system of the municipality is
co-authored by two practices Ctrl G (led by Catalina Patiño, Viviana
Peña and Eliana Beltran) and Plan B Arquitectos (led by Federico Mesa,
who happens to be my brother). They originally won the bids for two
kindergartens, in San Antonio de Prado and Pajarito La Aurora, which are
shown here. Completed this summer, the EDU liked the proposals so much
that it is using the same scheme to design and build 10 more. Of those
10, the Ctrl G and Plan B are designing two more, Carpinelo and Santo
Domingo Savio, to be completed next year.
Working with the EDU, the projects mix classic architectural design
with activities that are sometimes less visible but which have a high
impact in the less-favoured neighbourhoods: agreements with the
community and social pacts. These buildings are not loose pieces
disconnected from the urban and social weave; but rather form part of
so-called Integral Urban Plans (IUPs), which take whole neighbourhoods
and activate social interventions on various scales: linking them to the
integrated transport system, carrying out reforms in schools, improving
housing, constructing library parks, enhancing public spaces, cleaning
up the rivers and streams, building police and security centres and
inaugurating business development centres.
The two kindergartens
in San Antonio de Prado and Pajarito La Aurora are organic buildings
which share a common floor plan and the repetition of a modular
classroom in the form of a petal, yet they adapt in different ways to
their respective topography. In so doing, they are simultaneously
systematic and singular. The geographical placement of the buildings is
interesting, too, because of various spatial turns involved, the
combination of different inclinations of classroom roofs and the vibrant
undulations of the terrain on which they stand. The roofs constitute
the most interesting images of these small educational groups, becoming
in a way another facade due to their position on the steep
mountainsides.
The principal element of these architectural groups
is the concrete canopy. This strip follows the circulation routes,
hiding differences in floor levels and linking groups of classrooms. The
canopy gathers together the turns and inclinations of the classrooms
and their roofs; it adds unity to the volumes and gives them scale; it
keeps them low to suit their function.
These canopies seem to
control everything: they open up space for the classrooms, giving them
height; they open up to the landscape, with numerous windows featuring
coloured and different-sized glazing; they allow the body of the
building to traverse the gardens and they include the services and
eateries. When necessary, they separate from the classroom volume and
turn into fluid walkways framed by gardens. Though the classroom modules
adapt to different platforms, the canopies both horizontally stitch
them together and separate them.
This is why the section of the classrooms is a surprise, especially
when two or more classrooms are joined. The reduced scale of these
kindergartens created by the canopies is reinforced by the doors,
columns, toilets and sinks, and by the soft concrete spaces that
constitute the architectural groupings to generate a childlike and fun
atmosphere.
These kindergartens are rich places in small spaces.
Turns and connections open up the possibilities for play and allow for
multiple experiences. The extensive openings in the facades are intended
to bring the children closer to the gardens and tropical vegetation.
The
designers used the slogan ‘the kindergarten of gardens’ and, in their
terms, the exterior space is thought out in the same way as the
interior.
A net of polygons drawn in floor plan delineates both
the classrooms and the gardens, with each polygon being seen as
equivalent. The roofs, which are covered with synthetic grass, could
have been planted but were not, partly for bureaucratic reasons, partly
for maintenence.
The idea of planting a real garden while the
kindergarten was under construction belies an underlying principle, as
if the order established by architecture should also promote a natural
order. The effect is to create real civic centres, giving them a wider
range of uses and greater utility and recognition than ever was planned.
