The Faculty of Education Sciences' Green Island and Path is a project where spaces for children are designed in a naturalised environment from an educational point of view. The project is based on the idea of rethinking current playgrounds, creating outdoor spaces for children where boys and girls connect with nature, interact with different types of materials. Due to its location within the University of Malaga, this new urban park is proposed, dedicated to children and students, where they can interact and learn from each other. Its location between the Faculty of Education
Sciences and the University's Nursery School is key, this allows us to create two different and at the same time united spaces where some can play and others learn, therefore learning by playing. On the one hand, a topographic space is created where students can rest and on the other a more constructed space where children develop their learning linked to play and nature as teaching resources. Thus, it is proposed to rethink green and rest areas as learning environments. To do this, the pre-existing elements of the site, the new soil to be incorporated, the new vegetation and the new proposed architectures are studied from a pedagogical perspective, understanding space and vegetation as teaching elements. The main elements of the project are the current and proposed vegetation, the operational topographies, the architectural fold and the materiality.
The fold thus creates different types of spaces for the development of the child, spaces where they can play with sizes, with scale, work on motor development, or teach small classes, a set of open scenarios where they can continually create new routes and games linked to nature. Vegetation is key to the space, not only for the quality and quality it offers to the space, but also the natural shade in the play spaces: All the existing trees on the site have been maintained, creating small topographies and fences where the fruits can be stored and which can serve as play elements; new shrub vegetation has been incorporated to work with the senses, color, smell and textures to turn them into learning and play elements.
The topographies made with different types of textures are areas for children to rest and at the same time to walk through, offering a new space for relating to the trees, walking through them at different heights, interacting with the trunk or the crown. There are also some prefabricated pieces as benches to sit on or slide on. The materiality has sought to combine the most natural and the most contemporary, for this purpose different textures of sand, gravel and native vegetation are used to create the areas of the park and the fold uses elements built in Solid Surface for easy cleaning and adaptation to different shapes.
Team:
Architects: Ferran Ventura
Collaborators: Candela García Huber, Raul Ruiz Alaminos, Nerea Salas Martín
Photographer: Fernando Alda
Materials Used:
Porcelanosa Grupo
Escofet
