Virolai Petit Kindergarten

Barcelona, Spain

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Virolai Petit Kindergarten

Barcelona, Spain

Firm

Team Sarrablo / Equipo Sarrablo

Type

Educational › Elementary School

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2017

Team: Vicente Sarrablo, Jaume Colom, Jordi Roviras and Cristina García

The Virolai Petit kindergarten in Escorial Street, Barcelona, was built for Virolai, a private developer who has long-standing experience in educational centres.
Situated at the north end there is a large sports centre, while on all the other sides the school has free façades. A closed façade in Escorial Street protects the building from noise and it opens onto an inner patio with views of green areas at three terraced levels starting from the roof. There are playgrounds on each level, the forged fronts of which improve the orientation of the classrooms. Every floor contains three classrooms with a porch each that give out onto the school patio where educational activities are carried out when the weather is nice.
One of the main ideas of the project was to flee from the typical image of schools with playgrounds on roofs that look like metal cages added on top of buildings. For this reason, the enclosure of the roof playground stretches out as far as the street and its lay-out reminds us of a Florentine palace, including a tripartite division of the façade, in which the classical bossages are now a Flexbrick textile of white ceramic tiles that unifies the three levels: sunscreen, rainscreen and base.
The mixed concrete and ceramic tile panels placed at the base of the building represent an important technical innovation: as the internal reinforcement of the ceramic textile does not contain a concrete perimeter frame, the ceramic pieces can reach the very ends of the panel. This innovation has enabled the continuity of the checkerboard pattern of the textile on the three different parts of the main façade.
The layout of the roof playground is triangle-shaped and consists of the dividing wall of the sports centre, the previously mentioned Flexbrick sunscreen facing Escorial Street and a second sunscreen overlooking the interior of the block. These veils of ceramic textile provide the patio with a protecting shade and filter the urban surroundings while the children are playing outside.
The interior façades of the building are less monumental. Their scale has been adjusted to the size of children. On the ground floor, small cubicles projected towards the patio divide the porches of each classroom into sections and their scale and elevation at mid-height remind us that children feel safer when they can play under a table.

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Virolai Petit Kindergarten

Barcelona, Spain

Virolai Petit Kindergarten

Barcelona, Spain

Product Spec Sheet

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