When asked what a house is, the children draw the archetype of a facade with a door, two windows, and a roof from which a smoking chimney emerges. For the children who grow up and are educated at the Reggio School, designed by Andrés Jaque on the outskirts of Madrid, things should not be so clear. His school does not have a gabled roof and although it has chimneys, doors and windows, neither do they resemble the ones in the stories nor do they stick to anything familiar, because sometimes they are like puzzle pieces and other times like bulging eyes of a toad.
This strangeness is intentional: for Jaque and his clients -followers of the pedagogy of wonder at the Reggio Emilia Schools promoted in post-war Italy by Luigi Malaguzzi-, the place where one is educated cannot be a neutral space, but rather the first ecosystem of human experiences; hence it must be studied, taken care of with care. The idea is that architecture itself can be educational and that one of its first functions is to stimulate the imagination and encourage doubt. That is to say: to keep children away from prejudices by confronting them with what is different, what is strange.
Turning the rare into a redeeming category is precisely one of the keys to the work of Jaque, today dean of the Columbia School of Architecture, and whose works, from the rectory in Plasencia to his artistic installations at MoMA, are samples of deliberate, enlightened, provocative extravagance.
There are many deliberate extravagances of the school. The first is that it is reached by a double ramp whose excessive length is due to the strange shape of the site, arranged tens of meters from the street and only connected to it through an appendage of land. Long as it is, the ramp ends in a kind of drawbridge of an enchanted castle that leads diagonally to the so-called agora, a multipurpose space where, as in the rest of the building, the facilities are left visible as a povera statement. The agora opens to the outside through two emphatic arches, one luminous and covered with pavés, and the other endowed with a large metallic and blue door that opens and closes mechanically as if it were a shutter from a shop or a Jacques Tati gadget. . Through the door you go to the loggia, a place for games that is exposed to the sun and connects with the beautiful school library. From there you can see the green corridor that extends along the southern flank of the building to bathe it in light and air.
tropical garden. Linked by a diagonal, the ramp, the agora and the loggia make up the infrastructure attached to the ground, where open spaces, elemental shapes and the somewhat monumental presence of concrete predominate. On this foundation the rest of the floors are stacked according to a scheme that reflects the principles of progressive evolution of the Reggio Emilia pedagogy. Thus, the youngest children occupy the lower classrooms and as they get older they pass through the upper classrooms. As it gains height, the building also gains lightness and there is a moment when it gives up its spaces to a tropical garden that compensates for the hardness of the exteriors and is supported by a structure that is halfway between the jardins d’hiver in Paris and the Almeria greenhouses..
The formal opulence and the stacking of spaces -the fact of understanding the school as an ascent path for creative exploration-, give reason for the rarest, most extravagant element of the building: its façade. Educated in geometric rigors, architects tend to order. This is not the case of Jaque, who prefers impossible juxtapositions and entropic calligraphy. Nevertheless, the façade of the school is still rigorous in its own way: each part reflects its internal content, has its own type of windows, and this inflexible logic makes the building assume, while transgressing, the aesthetics of the semi-detached houses In addition, the ascending order of the classrooms explains why the volume is made up of layers -as if it were an architectural tiramisu-, while the stairwell hypertrophies until it becomes a tower that perhaps alludes to those of the Disney castle.
For its part, the stairwell is openly exposed to the outside and hypertrophies until it becomes a tower that perhaps alludes to those of the Disney castle. There’s no room for the hackneyed in this stacking and dating game. In fact, it seems as if everything was exaggerated in an effort not to fall into the conventional, and the result is that the building takes the shapeless form of a collage of singular moments, a kind of exquisite corpse.
The metaphors of the exquisite corpse and the tiramisu confirm the general impression produced by the school: that of being a dreamlike, surreal artifact. Surrealism that is due to a pedagogical dream and that, due to its willingness to combine extravagance and rigor, has less to do with the disturbing manner of a Max Ernst than with the paranoid-criticism of a Dalí. The impression of surrealism is reinforced by the portholes that, like those of medieval angels, are spread over the entire skin of the building and make it a sort of emphatic Mickey Mouse house. And it is also reinforced by the fact that the façade is covered with an irregular layer of projected cork, where over time, and as if they were crops, lichens will grow, just as the capillary vegetation that peeks out of the outdoor planters grows. This flaccid, organic and almost nutritional character of the façade makes us think of the candy hut that, in another surreal tale, Hansel and Gretel gobbled up. And it reminds us once again of that Dalí who, in his efforts to combat the cold and puritanical Le Corbusier, advocated a “soft, hairy and edible” architecture, a bit like that of Gaudí who he admired.
We are not sure that Jaque can be assimilated to Gaudí, but there is no doubt that surrealism and the grotesque tradition in general -a grotesque that here is not sinister, but camp, friendly and enlightened- find in this building such a rare example as brave. Reggio College does not want to be a cold, oiled teaching machine; it aspires to become the stage, between childish and dreamlike, for the sentimental education of homo ludens.
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