Collaborators: Andrea Hernandez, Andres Amelinckx, Anne Van Strein, Carlos Bastidas, Cesar Gavidia, Claudia Heinzl, Elias Gonzales Sanavia, Frankling Bravo, Freddy Ferro, Ganbat Choidogjamts, Ingrid Gosse, Jose Antonio Nuñez, Lea Ruefenacht, Luis Efren Santana, Olav Kvalnes, Natacha Pinto, Nestor Corzo, Rafeal Machado, Ramon Collazo.
The “Voz Alta” Autistic Foundation’s new headquarters and educational building is located in the Caracas municipality of Baruta. The school is oriented to the specialized teaching of children with autism for both pre-school and elementary grades.
The school is oriented to the specialised teaching of children with autism for both pre-school and elementary grades. In total, the building includes 10 classrooms for approximately 80 students. The classrooms are organised around a central patio with a north-south orientation to guarantee good illumination and ventilation. The design features a ramp as the main vertical circulation that wraps around the external perimeter of the building.
The ramp circulation unites the public and private functions and creates a space where children can have their daily physical activity in a protected environment. Both the ramp and the more private vertical staircase will be covered by a modular steel cage façade that will allow for ventilation and illumination throughout the building, but more importantly, it will add safety for the children in the public corridors.
The project was developed on an unfinished kindergarten site left over by the previous Mayor of the borough of Baruta, one of the five Municipalities constituting Metropolitan Caracas. After analysing the soil studies, we realised like many times before that the municipal land was of such poor soil quality that no developer would ever have considered it worth developing and therefore available for social services. When the municipality gets land in exchange for zoning from landowners it is usually poorest land, so it was. In our own analysis of all needs and setting the financial limits we knew the site had potential. If we would find a way to build on a small footprint concentrating the investment and use the land as a social incubator between the school and the neighbouring areas, Hospital, Barrio, Residences and commercial centre. We then set out to develop a design that could create an exercise of civic program and of public space integrating the adjacent municipal playground.
The reliance on an educational framework that suits the fitness of the children builds them up from individual competences and requirements, strengths and weaknesses to offer them a fitting and adequate rather than a standardised development program. We started to sketch up design ideas for translating our first intuitive ideas of a continuous ramp building into concept drawings and sketches, discussed with the Higashi staff. It was a challenge to make a design for a safe and healthy environment and great architecture that could be at the service of children bringing a sort of normality back to their lives. An open school concept as the synthesis of an open building, engaging rather than isolating in an active community.
We had a solid conceptual idea, to save the open park land in order to integrate the children from FAVA with the people of the neighborhood. Instead of a horizontal building covering most of the site we proposed a vertical solution set into the hillside, a total of four floors with a sports hall overlooking the valley on the last floor. The entire complex is a Park, Kindergarten, kitchen, classrooms, music labs that are connected to the rooftop gymnasium as one continuous ramp, wrapping around the volume of the building allowing for a very soft ramp (less than 5%) to access the entire building. An inside-out Guggenheim Museum of sorts that allows the children to engage in an experience to explore their building and extend that experience into the Park. Everybody can easily understand both its internal as well as its external qualities.
This special school design makes use of its site in a creative way, providing ample spaces for encounter and climate control and can be occupied in infinite ways. Quickly it became clear that the optimism of the Foundation and all the staff would be able to get this project forward. In 2011 the school was opened and the children are making small steps and progressing day-by-day with the powerful synergy of a fun creative building in a park surrounded by trees.
