Nursery Shool Santa Susana
A kindergarden placed in an early XX century building
The nursery school is placed in a heritage building by Antonio Palacios. Built in 1908, the "Pavilion of Artistic and Industrial Recreation", was promoted by the equally named Society. It was inaugurated in 1909 and was part of the Galician Regional Exhibition of that year. The building is located in the “Alameda”, the historic urban park of Santiago de Compostela.
The building originally had two floors: the ground floor and the main floor. The ground floor, with a bigger surface, acted like a plinth and had no direct access from the park. The main floor consisted of a large ball room that occupied the whole volume. In the rear facade there was a staircase volume that connected both floors.
The building's main feature was the large wooden windows and a metallic roof with curved geometry in its center part and statues on pedestals in the upper corners of the building that guarded the main entrance.
Modifications.
Nowadays the building hosts a nursery school. Throughout the 20th century the building underwent two renovations and some ornamental elements were removed, like the statues. The roof was remade as a ceramic tile hip roof with masonry parapets.
The main floor's volume was divided in two levels by the addition of a new slab. As a result, the vertical communication volume grew in height to accommodate the new sections. This slab also intersected with the large windows that defined both the main and the lateral facades, so the original windows were replaced with aluminum ones with dividers.
The new roof of the staircase volume consisted of a three sloped tile roof and became adjacent to the main building's roof, completely modifying the initial concept from Antonio Palacios.
The assignment consisted of the rehabilitation of the building maintaining its use as a nursery school and adapting it to the programmatic needs defined by current regulations while improving its technical conditions to desirable standards.
A new zinc roofing was planned, recovering its original materiality. The roof parapets were also claded in zinc, treating them as an extension of the facade. It was intended, thus, to correct the “flat roof effect" by incorporating the zinc roofing to the façade view and by allowing a clearer view of the pedestals of the lost statues. New zinc gargoyles were added to act as an overflow for the new downpipes.
The requirements of the nursery school program did not allow to completely recovering the ball room space with which the roof was related in terms of scale and proportion. For this reason the possibility of recovering its original volume was rejected. So the second floor slab was cut and separated from the main and lateral facades which allow perceiving the original height of the ball room. The windows were also released from the division caused by the slab and cross views are now possible along the width of the building. This slab cutting results in a secondary interior facade in the space generated. This space includes a lobby that is lighted by two roof windows and that is connected to the second floor by a double height. It also has a discreet connection to the ground floor through two glass prisms that introduce light in it.
As for the vertical communication piece, the need to maintain the access to the second floor and the incorporation of an elevator (and, therefore, the legal requirements regarding a minimum free height for maintenance) made it impossible to reduce its volume. The strategy adopted aimed at recovering the autonomy of the volume with respect to the main volume and incorporated composition lines that bore resemblance to the original volume and its
The masonry windowsills were removed and new wooden windows, based in the original Palacios design, were installed.
