UNI DORI MUNICIPAL NURSERY SCHOOL: BADALONA
Following the same basic organisational scheme established for the Els Daus nursery school in Cardedeu, this project served to develop and extend the concepts and functions that had been so successfully designed and executed on that occasion, with an attempt to improve those aspects that, as a result of that original experience, needed to be re-evaluated, particularly in view of the fact that this new building had twice the surface area of Els Daus.
The project occupies a total built up surface area of 1,271.41 m2, with four sets of classrooms for up to 107 pupils, a 76 m2 wing on one side for babies up to a year old (with a capacity for eight), plus three modules, each of 130 m2, containing a total of six classrooms, three for children from one to two years old (each having a capacity for thirteen children) and three more for children from two to three years old (each one with a capacity for 20 children).
The basic idea of the project consisted in the layout of the classrooms, brightly coloured wooden ‘cubes’, for each of the different groups of children, on a partially roofed translucent surface that, having been designed as a kind of boulevard or street, contains and develops the full range of school activities. In this same boulevard, the service and administration blocks, completely built in wood, project their most welcoming façades in order to get the children to participate in the activity generated by the dynamic of the school.
Translucent and irregularly shaped spaces, a complete absence of corridors and unused spaces, bright colours, shapes, etc. This is a school that has been conceived as a game of spatial effects aimed at providing extra motivation for children and the way in which they experience the school; a building that takes on the responsibility of transmitting new and positive sensations to the children and stimulating them in their first contact with the exterior world.
