16/07/2014
Nuevo Continente School / Miguel Montor, Querétaro, Mexico
From the architect. As a follow-up for the master plan in the school consolidation for The Nuevo Continente School Querétaro Campus, this building is the most extensive and complex to perform within the facility, both because of its location as well as because it is on the level that has the largest number of students; therefore, the most complex task was to build it in two stages, relocating only half of the students, while the other half continued working in their current classrooms. This is because the school did not stop operation for a single day.
This largely determined the morphology of the architectural scheme, a sequence of modules determined by the use of classrooms which are separated from each other by terraces on different levels that achieve to providing tours and pauses between classrooms, almost like small patios on the different levels.
This idea would end up being the focus of design of this piece; no classroom would be wall to wall with another one, there would be always a garden, terrace or patio between them, allowing the landscape to be of great importance in the experience of each space, making the void prevail over the solid and taking the crossed air circulation as one of the main points, since the weather in Queretaro is very warm most of the year and it is necessary to lower the temperature and create a microclimate in the spaces that compose the building.
Within this architectural scheme, the landscaping project would become a fundamental part of the consolidation of both space and experience as well as for the climate of the campus, achieving through borders and vegetated terraces, experiences that at all times let the user have contact with the vegetation, a vital part within the project.