Children Village Canuanã school
200best ES
Rosenbaum
Aleph Zero
2017
Type
Social
Tags
learning environments, spaces of care , spaces for youngsters, wood structures, 200Best, progressive pedagogies
Visitability
Visible from the street
Description
Bradesco Foundation invited the A Gente Transforma project, led by the Rosenbaum firm – an architecture and design firm that works with innovation – to rethink and qualify student houses at Fazenda Canuanã, in Formoso do Araguaia, state of Tocantins; a rural school maintained for almost 40 years. “We didn’t know how to begin this project, as there is no other boarding school in Brazil with so many students,” said Denise Aguiar, Director of the Foundation.The goal was to redesign the houses for 540 children, who would live there between the ages of 7 and 18, the children of settlers, caboclos and indigenous people who live in the rural area of Brazil’s mid-west, whose transportation would render school attendance impossible, thus requiring a boarding school regime. Moreover, the challenge was to turn a learning space into an area with the value of a home. After all, it is a space that plays multiple roles: it’s a house, it’s family, it’s a shelter, it’s a laboratory, it’s a classroom.The essential design methodology was applied by the Rosenbaum firm to reconnect people and space to their roots. Investigative and co-creation immersions were carried out with students, teaching staff and the A Gente Transforma team and, in addition to knowing the surrounding area and its relationship with the caboclo and indigenous cultures, many activities guided the participants in the process of jointly creating the entire project. Cocreation is a value for the firm, and it is part of the methodology. For Marcelo Rosenbaum, “a collective movement has the strength necessary to redesign meanings.”In this situation, thinking the architecture played two roles – to provide an atmosphere of welcome and affection, and to reconnect the people to the local ancestral history, values and identity. For the architecture team, A Gente Transforma invited Rosenbaum and the Aleph Zero office, who shared the translation of conversations with all parties, and implemented it in the complex occupation of the spaces.They used architecture techniques that employ materials and resources from the environment. They also used common construction methods from that region, as well as its raw materials, including: adobe bricks, wood, straw weaving, the caboclo’s house, the importance of the river, and indigenous graphic drawings. “The cerrado and the popular knowledge are part of the scenario in Brazil’s central region. The architecture proposed there could not be different from this context,” noted architect Gustavo Utrabo, of the Aleph Zero office.The Canuanã school is considered the largest wood construction in Latin America, with approximately 1,100 cubic meters of reforested wood. The structure, of glued laminated timber, is a high technology that enables the industrial manufacturing of certified wood, with a light, cozy result of low environmental impact. Combined with adobe bricks and landscaping based on local species, the project displays an integration of architecture with the teaching process based on tradition and innovation.(Description provided by ROSENBAUM )