Blossom at MaErKang
Primary school and dormitory building
Sara Rojo, Gádor Luque, Víctor Quirós
Honorable mention. 2009.

 

MaErKang belongs to the Tibetan Valley. 
There the landscape becomes a blanket of flowers that blossom at the same time during one spring night. 
There the sun shines all the year. 
There for a long period was placed the most important Middle School of the Abba prefecture. 
There the earthquake ruined almost everything, but the flowers and the sun are still alive.

 

We have decided to maintain the existing landscape as a geothermic cloak. By keeping the existing forest (mountain at South East in between Secondary and Primary school) we intend to avoid shadow casting and wind draft. In this way we set up a new artificial landscape above the existing one. By doing so, the present setting will receive the solar radiation through the solar panels and because of its green-roof composition its thermal behavior should work much better.

 

The school-building is a body with three arms. Everyone contains six common classrooms and they hug the nature and the sports areas. The trunk is perforated by the patio (conceived as a Chinese Garden) that generates natural ventilation and introduce vegetation inside the building. Around this poetic space the special classrooms are placed according to different requests as they were organs.

 

We conceive the skin that support the artificial landscape as massive to the north and open to the south. The north facade is built with rammed earth which generates a natural-green-wall which will have no need of any protection or maintenance. The West-South-East facades are   generated by logs that change the distance in between depending on what the needs inside are. This skin is provided with a glass layer to the inside, so the kids may experience indoors the feeling of being free in the forest and at the same time protected.

 

The second and third floor are seven flowers that organize the dormitory building as independent elements. Flower as an energy processor. Each petal is a room crowned with a solar glass. And the calyx is a water-obtainer that also creates reflected light by leaving a pond in the top. Reflections as all the water accumulations in nature...