Project description by CREA
Nature’s first green is gold.*
Integrated in the Centennial Plan for the portuguese elementary schools and inaugurated in 1958, the Bom Sucesso equipment has recently returned to the school community, after the rehabilitation and expansion project developed by CREA Studio.
Hidden in a glade within the consolidated city blocks of central Porto, the complex included an extensive outside playground flanked by three original buildings that have been previously expanded. Our project sought to interpret and rethink the complex in light of the new school program, and its relation to the surrounding space of the urban blocks and the public street.
In parallel to the accurate rehabilitation of the classrooms, common areas and circulation spaces, the addition of two new volumes aimed to discipline the various moments of the school. The arrival of the parents with the children, in the porch attached to the new gymnasium, which separates the parking lot from the outside playground. And the path to the new kindergarten, and existing buildings, from which one dominates the wideness of the lot, progressively revealing itself.
Clarifying the playground centrality and hierarchizing the relation with the school’s surroundings, the added buildings display the presence of natural light throughout all the interior spaces; whether it is the kindergarten’s classrooms facing the morning light, the hallways and activities rooms facing a patio, or the new gymnasium widely opened to the playground and to the framed tree tops, in the south light.
The architectural process progressed in close proximity with the school community and parents of the students with whom we developed a close dialogue during the project.
We believe that in city life we are often unconnected with nature and with this project we strived for children to embrace the broad and luminous space of the school surrounded by trees, injected with ocher hue and a small but yet vibrant blue square, for games.
*excerpt from Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Robert Frost.
