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Architects: EDU - Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano de Medellín: Urban Development Enterprise EDU - Medellin - Design Workshop
- Area: 5122 m²
- Year: 2012
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Photographs:Alejandro Arango
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Manufacturers: Calorcol, Colpisos, Concretodo, Hunter Douglas, Quasar S.A
Text description provided by the architects. Transformation of Medellin, education and culture have been the main platform for true social changes, where physical infrastructures are essential in the inclusion of quality policies in areas where state hasn’t been before and low levels of human development are common. These spaces are operated from Educational Ministry and Citizen Culture, seeking mainly to improve the education quality to reduce dropout and repetition rates in early grades in elementary school. This project it’s about how to contribute to citizen encounter, integrating these infrastructures to the city, to its inhabitants and the recovery of public space.
MEDELLIN Transformation has given the public space and the public building, the most important value to build a place for the citizen encounter and the best scenario where it is possible to build a society that based on diversity, is recognized and accepted as the way to a better living.
State coordination with its programs and projects in bounded strategic territories that allows integral transformations of high physical and social impact, where planning and urbanism is the vehicle.
The design conceived from the Urban Development Enterprise - EDU through its design workshop, realized that the impact on the transformation of neighborhood and their inhabitants was successful through the gathering of programs and projects compactly, linking it to the development of public space for community encounters. The challenge for EDU was to consolidate under the strategy, new educational centralities, the united work of different government entities, Buen Comienzo, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Culture and Secretary of Environment, to focus all joint actions in the same territory. A Urban design created in turn by the hand of community and its ideas, which guaranteed an identity and ownership by them.
Architecture and urbanism as platforms for meeting among the state with its programs and projects and communities with their dreams and ideas achieving social innovation.
We learned how to listen to our main customers, citizens.
This project was placed precisely on the footprint of an old billiards factory located in an antique farm called Montecarlo, a vacant lot in the neighborhood Las Granjas at the comuna 3 (Manrique) in Medellin. One of the challenges was to concentrate a number of facilities that would lead a training process for the community, from the attention to pregnant mothers until training future musicians for the city. This allows us to conclude that not only projects are undertaken, but profound social changes are made.
Public architecture should celebrate the combination of ages, cultures, lifestyles and activities, along with animation provided by streets, squares and informal life that contains and act as a facilitator.
This project articulates a program composed by a kindergarten, a quality high school and a music school, which were involved in the middle of a recovered forest that becomes environmental park for the community. In short an Educational Centrality that respect environmental pre-existences and incorporates them as a fundamental part of its urban plan.
Respect for nature. Trees, shrubs and existing plants are the basis of design, architecture link up and involve them. Each on increases the value of the spaces generated.
This is a new version of facilities for Medellin were conceived from the "Containers knowledge" concept, the idea of a school that must be opened for changing the paradigm of limit instead of space of transition between the public and the school, change the grille for public hall where the community and the scholars is welcome. For this centrality it is about to form a large cover that allows the basic act of educating and get together students and the community around knowledge.
"Architecture without limits; public transformations erase barriers and reject "locked" spaces favoring open spaces. Buildings that get up on the first floors, generate thresholds, and ensure that buildings are the enclosure itself. "
These facilities are located strategically on the first floor of the architectural programs intensively used by the community, which are borrow by local people for training and leisure, the computers room, the recreational area (soccer field) and school restaurant among others.
Architectures who value the day to day affairs, and enhance the neighborhood life style. To stare from balcony, to descry, to play in the street, to talk on the terrace, to sip a coffee in a corner store, the neighborhood has taught us to value this cultural wealth and how to bring it to our projects.
Four architectural premises structure the idea of these centralities:
1. To create assembly modules: The regularization of replicable building elements permit thanks to its disposal, to build between them some dynamic spaces for the encounter. It’s about to generate quiet architecture systems easily buildable.
2. Integrator Voids: courtyards, walkways, forests, niches, squares, entrances, lobbies, endowed with qualities that stimulate the experience of citizens, producing desire to get in and study.
3. Space + Lived Experience: The construction of educational spaces, recreational places that stimulates to learn at different scales. Color, shapes, textures, dimensions, spaces of interaction and encounter.
4. Sustainability and Clean Buildings: Sustainability is an obligation and duty to the public sector, good architecture itself must be sustainable from the technical, social, economic and environmental.
From a material point of view, the educational centrality gets to be an icon identified from various areas of the city thanks to the intense colors of its finishing. In the case of the High School and the School of Music, the micro drilled Aluzinc facades sheet become with their covers in an area that wrap the interior and the circulation aisles, just like a translucent shell supported by a structural system of steel columns grouped in corsages that evoke the forest trees. These equally are an integral part of the evacuation system of rainwater.
Public architecture has the ability to become a symbol of the main policies of the city, the public gains values and becomes reference making evident territories for years forgotten.
This veiled container works as a system of extremely high bioclimatic comfort in thermal and acoustic matters and generate spaces. Quad height for the meeting of students, such as the entrance hall and the playground. Under this cover, the architectural program is constructed as simple porticated and serialized modules, with enclosures in masonry concrete block with ceramic aggregates and tile floors of ocher monolithic micrograin. The materials of these facilities are oriented to have a high resistance and few maintenance in time.
"There are no bad materials but misused. To build thinking for 100 years supporting minimum maintenance works that transcend generations. "
In the case of kindergarten, formal strategy is based on a "Toy Building", which through modular classrooms coupled to the topography, provides a fun experience for infants a space entirely designed for measurements of children. Here the material changes to a walls system type expanded polystyrene reinforced, plastered and painted which allowed rapid implementation and acoustic and thermal insulation. This building is a bioclimatic lab itself by designing each of its facades ranges as lighting, ventilation and percentages of ergonomic exclusive for early childhood.
The constant challenge is to make architecture that moves, each project is a great opportunity to create spaces of highest quality that that provides to the user and city positive feelings. Public buildings should be urban activators, first floors open architectures that protect and invite you to enter into a friendly content and redefine the places where are located.
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