Early Childhood Education Center
Architects
Sol89. María González and Juanjo López de la Cruz
Collaborators
George Smudge, architecture student; Insur JG, installations
Technical Architect
Joaquín Gutiérrez
Client
Ayuntamiento de Ayamonte
Construction Company
Construcciones Hermanos Cordero S.A.
Photography
Jesús Granada

A public building should be able to have no doors. We can think of facilities as fragments of the network of public spaces connected throughout the city that preserve their belonging to the same nature as streets, squares, and gardens. The Early Childhood Education Center is located in a low-density residential expansion area with a significant deficit of public space. The back of the plot where it is located borders an old gully that is difficult to access, sunk two and a half meters from the road, which the plan foresees as a public space. We believe that the nursery should serve to recover and qualify this place, so we conceive the project as a transit device between the city and the abandoned park, giving meaning to it as a place for games and stay for neighbors and children. The building bends down and turns around to look at the sunken park, measuring itself against the slope that delimits it and that will now also delimit the space of the children’s center, so that the depression defined by the old gully allows the Center to appropriate it as a large expansion space, incorporating it into the children’s space as an extension of the classroom place.
The Center is implemented as a neutral and floating volume that exhausts the limit of the plot due to the extensive program it houses, consisting of eight classrooms, common spaces, and administration. This neutral volume, ordered by an isotropic grid of pillars, is qualified through the changing section and a series of courtyards that recognize different areas, offering children a diversity of spaces to experience: interiors, exteriors, covered exteriors, sifted…, according to a gradient of privacy that transits from the city to the park. The exterior is covered with a Portuguese limestone from a nearby quarry that gives a precise and luminous profile, from whose volume we manipulate the longitudinal faces so that they appear as cuts towards the public space, remaining blind the other two elevations towards the road and the houses. These cuts are nuanced in search of more subtle relationships; the northwest access longitudinal facade has two faces, the exterior, which acts as a sieve allowing a glimpse of the descent ramp, is made up of industrial pieces of white concrete lattice for domestic use that, placed massively, are decontextualized taking on a new meaning. The second face is interior and the other limit of the ramp, it is a blind orange wall that causes the whole space to be filtered by a reddish light when the sunset glow, so characteristic of this coastal city, sneaks between the lattice and is reflected on the wall. The southeast elevation, corresponding to the Center’s classrooms that look out onto the park, is set back four meters from the limit of the stone volume, framing the view towards the play area and sheltering from the midday sun, avoiding views to the road and the built environment. This facade is resolved by carpentries embedded from side to side in the stone box protected with a series of punched galvanized steel blinds, which unfold when the Center is closed. The children’s space thus opens up to the park and is continued by the large porch, a piece of shaded park that finishes it off and reconciles it with the nursery.