barcelona es. art/music classroom. progress.

by baker architecture.

atrisco heritage academy high. the evolving idea. summer.

i'm coming back.

sending some aloha from buenos aires.

kindergarten and art-music addition. adobe acres es.

from this afternoon's more developed schematic presentation to the school building committee by rmkm.

a deft employment of the concept of compress-and-release  as it pertains to procession-- how one approaches and move through the building: from the south or parent drop off at the apex of the V, one enters into a gated entrance, encountering a brick wall, turning into the more visually porous  of glass of the parent/common's room, one pivots left, then right, arriving at the pit of the V, given two clearly delineated covered portico paths: right to the classrooms [and the exisiting media center and library beyond] and left to the art/music classrooms and to a possible outdoor amphitheatre its stage features the  'proscenium' of glass and of which is covered by a soaring roof of the art-music classroom. vantage along this contimuum of covered portico is expansive with a view of the playground. 

for its size, the building does much to the whole -- it, effectively, anchors and encloses  the quadrangle, handsomely delineates a southwest face of the school to the street, and more importantly, engages the campus beyond.

aspects of it are still being developed...

elsewhere in the district. helen cordero primary school [pre-k-2]

A [credit: rendering by GSL]

B

C

D
by garrett smith architects ltd; aps staff architect: davit ritchey; aps CM: john mazzola
[a post in progress...]

i first posited that GSL's reaction to the adjacent edward gonzales elem school not 50 yards away to the south dictated his design for this school: embodied as a rigorously geometrical parti hinting of idealized platonic solids modified [negated from/ added to] to conform to the program punctuated at key interior public areas by reverberant hues; this assemblage contrasts radically to ed mazria's sprawling baroque plan nearby. the superimposition is actually refreshing: free-wheeling and organic, on the one hand, tightly contained, controlled and rational on the other. he may disagree, but i am guessing that GSL would be as capable formally [as in here for his ruidoso ms. project] doing the ed mazria move had this rationalist project came first.

helen cordero's is, in fact, a further exploration of a concept/parti used at his 2004 la mesa elementary project. 

here, garrett develops it to include the use of large-scale perforated metal screens installed on steel grids [see also this project]-- an assembly that functions as a secondary building skin that serves as solar shade and onto which large signage and graphics are to be painted. he features the rhythmic geometrical appendages at facades to locate fenestrations and to break the otherwise flat planes. he disentegrates corners to lighten the massing and provide possible location for expansions. 

the visitor encounters bursts of arresting colors against a mostly neutral field. the orchestrated shifts in plane, objects arranged in space [as light fixtures, skylights, brise, sail towers] attached onto or hovering over facades renders and animate the fairly simple boxy structures with variegated visual interest when these objects cast their shadows onto planes. the result is a surprising depth for a building that efficiently and cleanly addesses a pretty straight forward programme. 

on some level, these concepts are imbued with international influences that hints of botta, snozzi, galfetti of ticino and lugano or terragni in como, regions all where the architect spends much time.