Center for Hearing and Language
Elevated above the ground, the new school is accessed by a slender path that winds towards the ground level. Here, one finds the main space of the gymnasium oriented towards the garden. The gym and the entrance area form a one-story volume which, from side of the building facing the garden, appears as a small pavilion between the noble existing trees.
In the back of this pavilion, the building rises to four stories and opens towards breathtaking views of the nearby valley and farmlands. The architecture focuses on developing two unique sides and articulates them with differentiated façades. The single-story façade recesses slightly inward to generate a covered entry, while the four-story façade indicates the stacking of individual levels by deflecting outward. Each offset creates enough space to accommodate shading mechanisms. The other façades are covered entirely in raw aluminum that reflects the ever-changing park in its colorless surface. With its sophisticated zigzagging and shining skin created from generic sheet metal, the building appears to be a precise optical instrument with two contrasting objectives: the proximity of the garden and the expanse of the view.
Ephemeral qualities are captured in a very precise manner to transform a predominantly temporal condition into a culture of permanence. The renovation of two massive provisional buildings becomes a new architecture of permanent lightness.
