Rethinking the school

Coordinator
Fermín González Blanco


CEIP Ortigueira
Xaime Furelos Vázquez
Luis Martínez Sánchez
Mercedes Maril Yáñez
Manuel Ángel Iglesias Gómez
Rosario Casal Mosquera
Miriam Miramontes Borrajo
Esther Domínguez Dubra
Francisco Ferreiro Blanco


Team members
David Rodríguez Antuña
Saúl Gómez Rubio
Luis Miguel Fernández López


Booklet & videos
Borja Díaz Carro


Photography
CEIP Ortigueira
Estudio Fermin Blanco


More about #REPENSANDO A ESCOLA
here




Description & Pictures
During the course 2014/15 this experience was launched in the Primary Education Public Center Ortigueira with students from kindergarten and primary education.


The values ​​obtained from the analysis of the immediate environment, in this case the school environment, coupled with the equipment and methodology used, are designed to systematize and replicate in different areas.


The experience of Sistema Lupo team on architecture is based on standaraized materials and cards with adaptive challenges for each individual school. Similarly the “memory planes” and the “project towards future” are something common to each center.


Certainly the case of Santa Cruzit is special for the peculiar of his past, but all centres can enrich its history with contributions from other generations.


Our goal is to continue the project in a plan of steps to end with the REAL project to expand the school.


We will try to continue this participatory dynamic that encompasses the entire educational community, parents, faculty, old alumni, and of course the actual ones.


In this course we have a team of 77 students willing to participate in the architectural future of their school.



What?
Comprehensive and experimental educational project focused on collaborative work that promotes a sense of community within the school and with their environment.


WHO?
Project carried out in a maximum condition of complicity between the cloister, ANPA, City Council and students of the CEIP Ortigueira in Santa Cruz de Ribadulla.


WHERE?
In a school with a very special history. In its day it was an educational experimental prototype, linked to the Free Institution of Education, designed by architect Antonio Flórez, “the architect of the schools.”


At present the school is awaiting a new extension to connect the bodies of nursery and primary schools. At this point the project connects with the educational community to think how the future should be.


How?
Different overlapping activities in a coordinated manner guided by the faculty ensuring consistency pedagogical project as a whole are projected.


Under the motto “architecture also educates” activities seek to raise awareness of the importance of the immediate environment of everyday spaces.





O cono

Following the work of artist Gordon Matta Clark, we plan an intervention on the teacher’s house as an act of reflection on how educational spaces should be in the XXI century and what role students must play in shaping these spaces. We cross the logic of educational systems to the spaces in which we educate trying to break down the walls of conventional education in a not metaphorical way.


The project is meant as a teaching unit itself where you can explain in simple terms the conical geometries derived from the different intersections of a plane with a cone. A practical approach its seaked primarily through small easily constructible models with a simple cardboard to understand the geometric rules.


Emptying cone-shaped exposed in the master’s house is intended to introduce students in geometric and mathematical concepts in a practical and fun way. The intersections of the cone with walls and floors generate geometries shaped ellipse, parabola or hyperbola.


All this implies the self transgressor effect of the artistic action. What at first looks like a collective madness ends up becoming a clear, effective action that will transform the space and make students definitely taking over it and identifying themselves with it.


The project sees education as a lifelong learning process. Demolition phases were executed by the students of a workshop school in which participants perform practices through this activity while complementing their training in masonry techniques.


Red color is assigned to all elements inside the cone or intersecting with it. Walls, ceilings, railings and lamps are capable of be painted if found inside the cone. And all this while staying within the lines drawn by the children themselves.


The final image of the intervention is set to be seen from the apex of the cone located in one of the rooms. The apex is located at the height of the student so that the work makes sense from that point of view being opencast the secret of the work as we abandon this perspective.


The whole house becomes through this operation in a play space for children who they appropriate and that so far remained unused. A new laboratory for experimentation and play.


The model on which we reflect and rethink the school is in this space in red, moving, changing … a space where we can observe from the apex of the cone like a peephole.





Living architectures

Hyperboloids, ellipsoids, hemispheres and other vertebrates.


It is an educational project framed within the actions of #repensandoaescola and aimed to think on the own environment through architecture and traditional and not so traditional basketry techniques. To do so this time we count with the close cooperation of the artisan and artist Idoia Cuesta, specialist in these issues. Idoia through their creations makes us think with our hands and his passion for the natural material helps us appreciate what surrounds us. In a school based in a region rich in vineyards and at the moment of pruning we develop these activities with the full complicity of the faculty and the educational community of CEIP Ortigueira.


All groups of kindergarten and primary education have participated in the different phases. The primary didactics is further complemented by theoretical sessions to bring the geometry to students, this time through real examples made from volumes of revolution. (In the previous year we had worked with conical and this year we jump to 3D). Before facing full-scale construction we built models conducted to understand the geometries and analyze traditional systems of tying vines as part of the process.


The ultimate goal is to work in teams to create playful architectures for the playground, using these techniques and controlling pruning and planting what we achiev are also living architectures. Now we wait for these “green shoots” that arrive in spring …


Varieties used


Ellipsoid. Salix triandra
Hyperboloid. Salix fragilis
Hemispherical. Salix purpurea + Salix fragilis on bamboo structure.





Novo aseo de infantil

In the third year we propose the construction of a new toilet for children. It is proposed as a project where children gives shape to one of the spaces they use daily.


The works come with surprises and the first was to find, during the demolition, clues of our industrial history in the bricks. Thanks to Miguel Díaz Rodríguez and Alberto Alonso Oro we know more about Ceramics to Caeyra, Founded by the Marquis of Riestra and suppliers of the material with which the school was built.


These bricks were reused to build the new façade, where the boys and girls design the new appliances that will define it.


The interior space is defined with curious elements and related to its future users like the exit slide that can be converted into a table in the classroom.


Education and learning are also present in the Color Lab designed to learn many things about how pigment blends work.