María Montessori School

Project Details

Project Description

This project is one of the four finalists for the 2018 MCHAP.emerge awards. The winner will be announced at the Symposium, Award Ceremony, and Dinner on April 12 at S.R. Crown Hall.

FROM THE ARCHITECTS:

Mazatlan, a city on the Pacific coast with humid a climate and high temperatures around the year, that invites us to think an architecture that considers how to respond to the climate and the high degree of salinity of the area. The strategy for this school then, should raise both to minimize the heat impact in the classroom; without losing natural light and relationship to the outside, as well as the use of construction materials and systems with little prone to corrosion. The project is located in an area with a single front to the city, you can set conditions and develop a controlled inward landscape. A kind of village that develops mostly introverted to its own patios.

The Montessori model is not a conventional system of education, classrooms should foster a dynamic atmosphere where children can experiment and awaken their senses. The shape of the classroom should favor these dynamics, so the recommended space should not be linear but centrifugal. A system of 19 hexagonal modules, and built in hollow brick, contain the classrooms, which compress to the inside, creating a perimeter porch that promotes thermal isolation and pressurizes the air. This porch in turn, solves circulation and a space for semi-open activities. The modules link and move out of phase with each and other to generate polyhedral patios defining a small landscape of tiny villas or modules at different heights capturing natural light and air currents through skylights.

The challenge was to develop a project that could be built nimbly in stages, where the first 1100 square meters should be built in four and a half months, so flexibility of independent modules was very important. Inside, these modules are customized to accommodate all kinds of environments, from administration and management to teaching and recreational, serving younger users that range from toddlers to children older than 12 years. That’s why the idea of scale serves largely to its inhabitants. The triangular openings in varying proportions, not only puts in crisis the idea of an opening, speculating that the triangle is an agile and playful geometry to build a window, but are conformed to the morphology of those who enter , from children to adults that pass through to enter the classroom. The idea is that both the classroom as a cell as well as the system as a whole allows children to freely build their own order.