Auctioneer: Comune di Cazzago San Martino
Location: Cazzago San Martino, Brescia
Contest: 2009
Construction: not realized
Architectural design: Marco Contini and Sara Chiari
Collaborators: Matteo Mascia, Giorgia Bianchi, Silvia Vezzosi
Type of intervention: new construction
Functional characteristics: nursery school with 5 sections, micro nest with 2 sections, refectory, dormitories, kitchen and game room
Area: 1,690 sqm
Kindergarten: so many places for so many activities. The school must be a safe place but also full of stimuli for the children, welcoming as if it were a ‘second home’ but at the same time open to make meetings and acquaintances in a new community and to learn skills outside the home environment. Children enjoy the spaces with all their senses, they are completely involved on a physical and perceptive level: of fundamental importance is the choice of materials, coverings, colours, lighting, openings at child’s height and the views that these openings offer, the presence of greenery and its change over time.
The spaces of the kindergarten are located in the largest volume, in the center of which there is an indoor garden or greenhouse. The distribution spaces are located around this greenhouse, they do not develop as simple corridors but open into ‘squares’, they are full of variations, different views and protected corners. Near the entrance, the distribution space is transformed into two large, communicating squares, one intended as a refectory and the other as a space for relations with games and seating; these squares can be used as a collective environment to bring together children and parents on special occasions.
In the project particular importance was given to these spaces of relationship, fundamental for children’s play and socialization, giving them a wide development and different formal and distributive characterizations.
