Nuestra Señora del Rosario Public School / Martín Lejarraga

Architects: Martín Lejarraga
Location: Torre-Pacheco, Murcia, Spain
Project Area: 4,652 sqm
Project Year: 2010
Photographs: David Frutos

Collaborators:  Julián Lloret, Mar Melgarejo, Claudia Montoya, Ana Belén López, Teresa Talaya, Policarpo Sánchez
Consulting: ACE Edificación
Client:  Ayuntamiento de Torre Pacheco
Construction:  Ferrovial-Agromán

From the architect. The land on which the school stands is located in a new, strategic growth area of the city, surrounded by public educational and cultural facilities: library, school, sports center. The project arose from a single comprehensive idea to design the entire block, from creating a new topography that is a reference in this area of expansion in Torre Pacheco, a new urban, cultural and leisure area for citizens, where public space, characterized by the folding of the terrain and the integration of different program, contains and protects buildings.

The school is a break in the city, a parenthesis of services, education and leisure in which children carry out their daily activities in an attractive, safe and above all, different way. It is conceived as a box of surprises, where fantasy and imagination, knowledge, dreams, and color are concentrated, where everything has multiple possibilities and uses: we walk on a roof or on a wall, we visit the greenhouse, the aromatic garden, perhaps today gym class is in the sports track, or we play basketball in the heights.

The project aims to solve in a simple, neat, and practical way the program raised, integrating the building with its environment, so that the architectural relationships between buildings make up the yards and different pavilions.

Thus the center is designed with several isolated rooms depending on the program, arranged in different levels according to their uses, with the elementary school building on ground level, with a separate courtyard, and the primary school building on the first and second levels, yielding a large porch on the ground floor associated to the courtyard.

The main entrance to the school is through a square, where vehicles – cars and buses – have the space necessary to drop-off kids under the main entrance porch. The square has 2 exit roads, in order to avoid hindering urban traffic, and increases the safety of students upon arriving at the school.