Nursery School in Haro - Pamplona, Spain, 2013

Architects: Taller Basico de Arquitectura
Design Team: Javier Perez-Herreras, Javier Quintana de Una, Edurne Perez Diaz de Arcaya, Manuel Anton Martinez, Xabier Ilundain Madurga, Joseba Aramburu Barrenetxea, David Santamaria Ozcoidi and Laura Elvira Tejedor
Client: Regional Ministry of Education, Culture and Tourism of the Government of La Rioja
Contractor: Luis Martinez Benito SA
Photographers: Pedro Pegenaute

The preschool is built on the urban limit of Haro. A place without buildings, marked with road lines, announces its immediate apparition. The strong slope delineates and discovers the possibility of an architecture of a geographic origin. The architects conceived an architecture dictated by crystallographic laws. The day care center is conceived as a great rock, a visible structure for that "buildingless" city. The building is erected from an array of horizontal and vertical concrete planes that construe in their organization the spatial structure of the center. The strong slope of the site crystallizes into two great horizontal planes. The lower one is anchored in the original topography, hosting maintenance and service facilities. The higher one gives room to the day care center's own use, elevating them from the existing topography. Both planes are intersected with a display of four great diagonal walls that organize the school program. From this intersection the day care center unfolds as a continuity of ample hollows that reveal their interior as a new architectural geography.