The design for the Alaior Day Center, by Montis Sastre Arquitectura, avoids monumentality and adjusts its scale to that of its immediate surroundings. The program is organized around a central Mediterranean courtyard that acts as a spatial, programmatic, and environmental core, promoting natural light, ventilation, and orientation for users within an interior that articulates light through ceramic latticework.
The building is constructed with load-bearing clay blocks, recovering the local ceramic hue and integrating structure, enclosure, and thermal envelope into a single visual and structural system. The floors are formed by curved ceramic vaults that provide thermal mass, spatial quality, and structural integrity.
Alaior Day Centre by Montis Sastre Arquitectura. Photograph by Lluís Bort.
Project description by Montis Sastre Arquitectura
The architectural proposal for the new day care centre in Alaior, designed for 30 users, takes shape as a compact single-storey building organised around a central landscaped courtyard that acts as the spatial and environmental core of the project. This interior void is not understood as residual space, but rather as a true architectural element that structures circulation, supports orientation, and accompanies the building’s daily life through natural light, ventilation, and a constant relationship with the outdoors.
The site is located at a point of transition between the urban fabric and the traditional agricultural landscape, establishing a direct relationship with CEIP Mestre Duran and with productive plots of land. The building’s placement responds to this hybrid context through a restrained, sober, and respectful architecture that avoids unnecessary gestures and prioritises both landscape and urban integration, embracing its role as a local public facility.
The building avoids monumentality and adjusts its scale to that of its immediate surroundings, adopting a calm and coherent architectural language. Materiality plays a fundamental role in this strategy: the load-bearing thermo-clay walls recover the ceramic tones present in the traditional architecture of Alaior, engaging in dialogue with the island’s white architecture through a contemporary interpretation. This construction system integrates structure, enclosure, and thermal envelope into a single element, reducing technical complexity and supporting a direct, legible, and durable construction process.
The high thermal inertia of thermo-clay contributes decisively to interior comfort, moderating the temperature fluctuations typical of the Mediterranean climate and reinforcing a passive, low-tech sustainability strategy. The floor slabs, resolved through curved ceramic vaults visible in the main spaces, provide thermal mass, spatial quality, and an honest expression of construction, without superfluous elements.
The functional programme is arranged around the perimeter of the central courtyard, orienting the main rooms towards the south and west and promoting clarity of circulation, flexibility of use, and natural lighting. The courtyard and the landscaped outdoor areas, articulated through ceramic lattice screens, create a pleasant microclimate and become an emotional point of reference for users.
Overall, the project proposes an essential architecture in which structure, material, and space form an inseparable whole, serving care, calm, and wellbeing, and deeply rooted in the slowerpaced way of inhabiting that is characteristic of Menorca.
