Educational Building: Architectural Review

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Establishing itself as a mediator between the public condition of its location and the intrinsic private aspect of its program becomes essential for the educational building proposed for the town of Smallville. The building offers a public space that serves as the main plaza of the town. The plaza directly engages the school and the town by the use of blade like walls that dissect the overall public space generating a multi layered condition that provides several levels of publicity, spanning from a collective and communal space to a more personal public space. These areas have a gradient-like characteristic that becomes increasingly private as the plaza merges itself with the school space. The school utilizes the atrium-like plaza as an extension of itself, converting it into an impromptu alternative performance space, cafeteria, and gymnasium, meeting place or alternative instructional space. Similarly, this space also serves as the main venue for the town’s events, such as fairs and dances.

The building is conceived as a series of folding blades that are inserted into the overall volume and start organizing and shaping the section and plan of the building. These blades become the veil that conceals at moments the interior of the school, and provide a sense of privacy while keeping approachable appearance of the school to the rest of the town. Such characteristic enables for two different conditions to happen within the building. The first one, when the circulation of the building has an outward focus, revealed to the public as a narrative of the buildings function, and consequently the actual program is veiled. The second condition creates the opposite, where the circulation takes place in a cavernous space with v...

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...e of material for the building. Furthermore, for the most part they are adequate for the area because they offer an appropriate climatic response. A similar strategy is used by Glenn Murcutt when choosing materials for his designs.

Several issues have not yet been design; however there is an understanding of the necessary end result. The design of the roof has to aknowledge and understand the way water can be captured and circulated in a way that can inform the architecture. The structural blades in the project could perform an essential role in the circulation of the water and how this is expressed. Moreover, another consideration is how the floor plate of the second level can become an architectural element that is able to engage in a dialogue with the roof and didactically express the overall composition of the building; blades, floor plates, screens and roof.

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