Santa Maria School of Buenos Aires

Memory

The project for the new building is developed on a 841.71 m2 property, located on Fragata Sarmiento 1817 Street, between Juan B Justo and San Martin Avenues in the City of Buenos Aires.

The students belong to the Secondary Education Level with an enrollment of 1,200 students divided into three shifts.

The site

It is of the utmost importance to achieve a harmonious relationship between the complex and the urban layout, tending to its consolidation. Due to both the particular characteristics of the land and the institutional function that the school fulfils in the territory, the new school is inserted in the neighbourhood leaning over the Municipal Line, taking in the urban layout and giving up a minimal fraction of land as an atrium for access to the building.

The damage suffered by flooding caused by rain and by the saturation of the piped stream under Juan B Justo Avenue is recurrent. The building will be preserved by raising the ground floor level above the maximum flood level.

General Plan

The layout is based on the western dividing wall and squares the general plan on that axis, rectifying all the premises. In this way, the premises with irregular surfaces are relegated to the opposite dividing wall, assigning to that sector uses that admit these shapes, such as preceptories, stairwells, laboratories and special classrooms (six educational spaces out of a total of eighteen). The school management, due to its relative location, maintains the control function over the complex.

The occupation of the back of the land with the Library and the Computer Room allowed us to improve the initial proposal and lower the height of the building by one level.

At the same time, the premises were systematized and modularized, increasing the performance of all the resulting surfaces. In particular, the sanitary premises were arranged to maximize their functionality. This procedure made it possible to concentrate the facilities and to establish clear distribution axes.

The building does not have basements due to the flooding characteristics of the site. Rather, the ground floor level was raised in order to avoid the historical problems suffered by the original building.

The architectural expression.

The institutional image takes on a dual character. On the one hand, as a public building, it belongs to the educational sector and to the city. On the other, it belongs to the urban environment, to the neighbourhood. The image contains some compositional elements that will be repeated in other educational projects, such as the exterior walls with common brickwork combined with exposed concrete, the natural aluminium carpentry, the horizontality of the windows, the cylindrical column in view at the entrance, etc., together with some particular elements that distinguish the building, such as the treatment of the ground floor on the façade.

Movement and change are announced in the exterior-interior transition from the entrance itself. The light, the interior-exterior relationship, the spatiality of the classroom courtyard, achieve a dynamic effect within the complex.