Prisms play hide and seek in a new school design
The Green Hills school campus, in the northern metropolitan area of Mexico City, is a campus planned in three stages, the first is the kindergarten which is now complete.
When Broissin architects were thinking about the kindergarten they were captivated by the concept of throwing buildings on the field as if they were toys. This prompted the location of all of the prisms that seem to be playing hide and seek, one building after another, leaving framed views of the surrounding forest.
The concrete parallelepipeds lean from one side to another encouraging the children to develop their creativity. For pre-school children, where students enter a stage of preparation for elementary school, the development of the project becomes more linear and simple with a construction consisting of reinforced concrete bays supported on exposed concrete piers that give the impression of a concrete building on stilts.
This elevated position on the terrain's slope favours the passage of rain water under the building as well as the formation of an ecological corridor for species that integrate the cold forest ecosystem of the region.
The design of the slabs of the classrooms are fundamental to the integration of architectural design and education, which, together result in the comprehensive training and optimal performance of the student. The segmentation of the north-facing slab into three parts, resembling a toothed structure, ensures natural light enters all the spaces equally.
Instead of using only fluorescent light, the use in parallel with natural light results in better attention, better reading development and better information processing in students, as noted in studies on the subject by Kuller and Lindsten (in 1992) and The Heschong Mahone Group (in 1999).