Education is being transformed; the learning process has changed its center of interest of the interchange of signals between man and the environment (stimuli - response), towards the study of the internal dynamic representations (mental) of the variation of the information. Today schools require not only to transmit knowledge or to develop habits or intellectual abilities, but also to develop all the integral potentialities of each person. The learning is not carried out only in the classroom; the student needs to assimilate the information that has learned and to fit this to its own perspective and to the time that faces to the community (the school) reaching therefore the success of the transmission. The Liceo Franco Costarricense School convoked us with the main purpose of solving this necessity to them, the informal learning outside the classroom. They wanted to have spaces that contributed with the encounter, the getting together, the reflection and the recreation. They wanted the spaces to identify the students with its institution. We had to take advantage of an existing infrastructure with little architectonic value and serious structural problems.
Main concepts:
To take advantage of the spaces between the buildings like places of informal learning where these are used like stage scenes. The external and intermediate areas
are improved mainly by means of textures of the ground and climatic protection: the location of building additions gives scale and proportion to them.
A new axis integrates primary and secondary school by means of the library. The axis projects primary school to its recreational area and eventually to the sport and cultural area. The administration yields space to open the space of the school towards the entrance.
To propose a contemporary image that identifies the institution by means of the harmonic coexistence of the existing buildings, the new ones and its articulations.
The new buildings (by means of purer volumes) give new facades to the old ones and they are united by means of beams that connect the pavilions. The cover that is proposed for the circulations of primary and secondary school "surrounds" the old buildings with a canvas not only to solve the bioclimatic problem but also to unify the formal volume.