ARRATIA MUSIKA
The proposal for the new Arratia Valley Music School begins with the recovery of a terraced building that connects the town and its edge park to the riverside promenade along the Arratia River. A retaining structure holds back the land, creates a terrace above it, and offers an interior waiting to be conquered.
Within this void, a series of boxes are placed in tension, reaching out towards the river and the landscape, weaving between the concrete columns of the existing structure and establishing with them a relationship of respect and distance. Four built pieces are introduced: three classrooms and a service volume.
Three timber boxes and one metal box; three classrooms and a set of bathrooms. Three interiors are lined with charred cork and light floors, while one is finished with soft pastel tiles. Exteriors are clad in boldly stained local red timber and corrugated grey metal sheeting. These are buildings with the appearance of found objects, as if they had always been there, or perhaps only in our memory.
They create no sense of strangeness. Playful on the outside, they welcome and relax you within. At times dark and intimate, at others flooded with light. They are tied together by a long corridor, cut through by a triangular courtyard that links the school to the roof terrace. Along it runs a long centipede-like cabinet, inviting students to leave their trikitixas and albokas before stepping inside to learn.
Learning from the surroundings and from what is already there. Because, in the end, that is what it is all about.
