CEIP GITANJALI - INFANTS AND PRIMARY SCHOOL: BADALONA
The project for the Gitanjali School was inspired by the ideals of a group of people from the Badalona area who decided to found a school inspired in the spirit and the message of love between people that was contained in the poems written by Rabindranath Tagore and compiled in his book “Gitanjali”.
The school is located in the old town centre of Badalona, near the sea, occupying a rather narrow plot of land nestled between party walls. The new building replaces an old barrack-style ground floor building that held part of the old school. Access to the rest of the plot is from an avenue, with another building in the modernist style, which completed the original layout of the school and which, following this remodelling, now contains the area set aside for the infants.
An architectural reading of the building, from its two façades, provides us with two possible interpretations, one image is urban, the façade that faces out towards the street, including the main entrance and offering a colder, more urban and modular image; while the inward facing façade, the side that the children see, is absolutely dynamic, marked out by its striking chromatic contrasts, through its movement and informally bright and pure colours symbolising a certain debunking of the serious aspect that schools, as an institution, are supposed to present to children while, at the same time, presenting a vivacious, happy and familiar image with which the children themselves can identify. In this way the building avoids being turned into a kind of box in which the children feel enclosed, becoming rather a place of play in which learning is just another activity.
The program is organized around the basement, which houses the gym and changing rooms, along with administrative services, lit and ventilated by means of a light well. The main access hall is on the ground floor and its most important areas are the kitchen and a dining area that was designed as a multi-purpose room. Above there are three upper floors containing both classrooms and smaller study rooms. There are two playgrounds areas, a court on the ground floor and also a covered playground.
The school has likewise been designed with particular attention paid to compliance with high standards of environmental sustainability.
The incorporation of a photovoltaic façade, fully integrated into the skin of the building, is one of its most outstanding elements, providing a capacity for electricity generation of 5 kW and decorated in chromatic blue tones, evocative of the light reflecting off the nearby sea and imbuing it with a very particular expressiveness. The school also produces its own hot water, thanks to a number of solar heat collectors that are incorporated onto the flat roof of the building’s central block.
The building is also equipped with a small centralised control system, which ensures that all of its systems can be run automatically, allowing for Internet programming and display while collecting and storing maintenance and energy saving data for the systems that have been implemented.
Consequently, the architectural conception of this building allows for the school to be imbued with a double educational component, on the one hand it acts as a containing space, serving as a traditional place of learning for children, while on the other the building also functions as an educational tool, teaching an understanding of the meaning of a sustainable way of life that one day, in the future, will be the only way for them to approach their relationship with the environment.
