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Timayui Kindergarten by
el Equipo de Mazzanti
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1 February 2012 | 4 comments
Categories: ArchitectureEducation
Timayui Kindergarten by el Equipo de Mazzanti
The monochrome, mosaic-clad classrooms at this preschool in Santa Marta, Colombia, are grouped into modular clusters around triangular courtyards.
Timayui Kindergarten by el Equipo de Mazzanti
Local architects el Equipo de Mazzanti designed the Timayui Kindergarten as an open-source project, hoping the format will be repeated in other communities.
Timayui Kindergarten by el Equipo de Mazzanti
The three concrete blocks that comprise each module contain bathrooms, two classrooms and a flexible open room, which surround each central courtyard like the petals of a flower.
Timayui Kindergarten by el Equipo de Mazzanti
The clusters are orientated to maximise natural ventilation and daylight, while each individual block features a tapered asymmetric roof.
Timayui Kindergarten by el Equipo de Mazzanti
Other unusual kindergartens we've featured include one with a curving concrete orifice and another with pyramidal chimneys - take a look at them all here.
Timayui Kindergarten by el Equipo de Mazzanti
Here's a longer description from el Equipo de Mazzanti:
PRE SCHOOL FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD IN TIMAYUI,
SANTA MARTA, COLOMBIA.
1 – PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS AND PRECONDITIONS
This project is part of the political concerns of the municipality of Santa Marta and the Carulla Foundation to improve the educational and nutritional conditions of the communities displaced by violence, and settled on the outside perimeter of the city. It is meant to develop infrastructure to improve the conditions of early childhood and low-income neighbourhoods to the most vulnerable population between ages of 0 to 5 years old. These areas are characterised by violence and lack of public infrastructure.
This project encourages and develops children, and supplies a balanced and dignified diet to help improve psychomotor conditions of children for their later developments.
Timayui Kindergarten by el Equipo de Mazzanti
2 – THE PRESCHOOL AS A MECHANISM OF SOCIAL INCLUSION
The challenge as architects in a context like Colombia is to develop projects that can generate social inclusion. The problem lies not only in designing and constructing buildings in deteriorated areas, but to activate new forms of use, ownership and pride in the communities.
The value of architecture lies not only in itself but on what it produces. To define these arguments it is necessary to extend our gaze beyond the architecture itself. Architecture cannot only relate to itself, but widening our gaze and finding new ways to operate, to resist and be better equipped to meet the current conditions. Therefore it is necessary to transfer knowledge from other professions as dissimilar as they are, because they are likely to enable us to find more efficient and logical ways to infer in reality, issues and concerns that nurture our labor as architects and to do acting architecture. (Defined by what they do and not by their essence.)
We define some strategies used in the project that are part of the objectives of our workshop that allow us to build architecture in deteriorated areas to act and also to be used in multiple ways by their inhabitants, but especially, by allowing them to become an element of pride and transformation in the communities where they are inserted.
Architecture is action. We aim to develop the performative capacities of architecture rather than its representational abilities or visual qualities. This is why we are interested in an architecture defined by what it does and not by its substance ("Architecture is not an end in itself" Cedric Price). We would induce action, effects, events, environments, allowing us to develop ways of patterns or material organisations that act directly to induce and to build social actions with the users, an Architecture capable of inducing new behaviours and relationships among the inhabitants of these abandoned and deteriorated areas.
Open Architecture. This interest has not lead us to find open architectures capable of changing and adapting to new social and cultural challenges. We are interested in organisational systems made of parts or modules as an intelligent organisational mechanism, which is not closed or finished. Their adaptive capacity allows them to grow or adapt to diverse situations, thus allowing us to develop various models based on the same rules of organisation that can be repeated in different places of the city, making more economical and sustainable projects.
Multiply use. The Indeterminacy as a design strategy allows us to think that our Architecture is capable of multiplying the uses for which it was originally intended to (not as effectiveness, but as a pledge of new relationships). The disposition and configuration of the buildings cannot leave places not defined functionally, this means that communities can