Using as its ethos the
archetypical principle of Anima Sana in Corpore Sano (Sound Mind in
a Sound Body) the Escuela de Balompié de San Juan (San Juan Football School and Training
Center) aims to create a space in which education and sports foster an
improvement of the conditions of public education and sports development in
Puerto Rico.
The School integrates in an effortless flow of
continuous spaces the four main areas of activities: study,
practice, rest and recreation. The Study area which is
designed as a trade school in which students can graduate with technical skills
includes classrooms, technical rooms, laboratories, workshops, lecture rooms
and a library. The Study area also includes office space for the faculty and
staff of the school. The Practice area provides all the necessary equipment for football training and
competition. This zone is composed of a football pitch, a gymnasium, a medical
room, changing rooms and showers, and a conference room. The Practice area is
aimed to be shared as a training center for the school’s
students, by other athletes and the by the community. Although connected to the rest of the building the Practice area is designed as an independent zone in order to be available for use
without interfering with the other functions of the school. The Rest area contains
an array of 28 rooms, laundry, and a cafeteria or meal hall, that can be used
by students and athletes with different schedules. The Recreation Area is
composed of a wide array of spaces that allow for several points of social exchange through the
building. The spatial strategy of the building features a
continuous plane that stretches as a ramp from the football pitch and gives
direct access to a lobby on the third level. The lobby distributes the students to the classrooms in
a U-shaped wing that encircles a private garden, and that provides shelter for the seating area
of the football pitch by floating over it. This wing is connected to a volume
that contains faculty offices and the rooms of the student dormitories. The
wing of the dormitories is projected as a slender volume that overlooks the
football pitch.
The new San Juan
Football School and Training Center aims at being
a paradigm of civic enterprise, educational building and high-level training
facility. The school intends to create a space where sport and education become
indivisible.
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