Early Childhood Education Center in Llubí

Situation Llubí, Palma de Mallorca
Area 468,63 m²
Year Concurso, 2017

Architects
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz

Collaborators
Rosa Gallardo, architect; Javier Cano, architect student

Client
Ajuntament de Llubí

The project for the new municipal nursery school in Llubí is implemented on Roca Llisa street as a Hopscotch, with lines that interconnect various spaces (interior, open, and semi-open) intertwined by the presence of children. This tapestry, formed by six walls interspersed with classrooms, courtyards, and porches, offers multiple situations depending on the children’s ages and mobility. The nursery school is the child’s first daily experience in a public building; it begins to explore shared relationships and live in a space outside the domestic environment. It is also an opportunity to start perceiving a material and spatial culture that will influence their worldview. The courtyards and porches scattered throughout the proposed plan draw from the repertoire of intermediate spaces rooted in southern tradition, providing children with numerous scenarios to move from the outside (the city space accompanied by parents), through the inside (with nursery staff in classrooms and common areas), to the inside-and-outside (courtyards, porches, and the open garden where they can play outdoors surrounded by the trees within the block).

The proposed project offers a system rather than a fixed proposal; within its walls, various combinations could be made to adapt uses according to needs. The space defined creates a matrix whose basic unit (4.5×4.5 meters) can host courtyards, porches, offices, and hallways, while its combination (9×4.5 meters) accommodates classrooms and multi-purpose spaces, or half of it (2.5×4.5 meters) can be used for parking needs. At the center of the project, beyond the entrance hall where parents drop off their children, begins the children’s area. A central space that transforms circulation routes into a meeting place, providing access to classrooms, the dining hall, the porch, and the garden, while also functioning as a multi-purpose room: an indoor garden for playing or holding joint activities, around which the entire nursery school revolves.

 

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The first section is reserved for staff, with two courtyards allowing natural light and ventilation for the kitchen and offices, located at the access control point in the second section. This arrival space is dedicated to parents: a covered porch for waiting, a lobby to leave strollers, and a courtyard from which they can glimpse the dining area and the play garden in the background. From here, the next three sections are occupied by children around the central space: classrooms for 0-1 year and 1-2 years, open to two smaller courtyards for supervision, and two classrooms for 2-3 years, open to the garden. The walls that define the five sections also serve as storage spaces—essential in these centers—supporting each room by housing chairs, mats, toys, educational materials, and everything needed to ensure versatility and comfort.

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The materiality of the project—colors, textures, and scale—addresses a dual aspiration. On one hand, the nursery aims to be a landscape; its plan, perhaps an evocation of the drawing of parallel lines traced in the territory by nearby crops, seeks to materialize through a palette of textures and tones that reflect Llubí. The walls, built with local marés stone blocks when exposed externally, adopt the materiality of furniture with pine frames and white panels indoors, creating a smaller, friendly, and approachable scale for the spaces. When the areas defined by the main walls require greater privacy or light control, their facades are enclosed with brickwork, whose pattern forms a lattice that limits the courtyards, allowing for privacy and airflow. The single-story plan is covered by a series of ceramic vaults of the same section that define the children’s area, providing dual lighting and ventilation and offering a unique perception—both for children inside and neighbors observing from nearby taller buildings. Various floors—soft, smooth, natural, and artificial—complete this Hopscotch, aiming to offer a sensory experience for girls and boys, where the local materials, intertwined with the diversity of spaces and the shape of the vaults, make the nursery a suggestive place for all the senses.

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