Lyrical geometry - architect Carme Pinos designs new school building in Morella, Spain

Architectural Review, The, June, 1996 by Raymund Ryan

Cascading down the slopes of a Spanish bill town, Carme Plnos new school is a dynamic yet legible fusion of space, light and raw materiality

It's difficult to get to Morella, the Spanish hill town with its dynamic new school by Carme Pinos. Driving from the coast, from the alluvial Ebro delta, you ascend into a highland world of rock and sparse vegetation, of twisting roads and isolated farmsteads. Suddenly, Morella appears with its historic fortress and churches and tumbling rooftops. The small town is a living monument within which Pinos' architecture is remarkably at ease. Her school manoeuvres itself to connect to the chamfered mass of the town and panoramic prospects of the countryside. In fact, it almost disappears.

The jagged, lyrical geometries for which Pinos is known are always intrinsically linked to the topography of site and the particularities of programme. The work at Morella (designed with ex-partner Enric Miralles but realised by Pinos) is an architecture of slope and additive components. The building is found just outside the ancient walls, or at least its great triangular roof of Cor-ten steel is visible from the ramparts before smaller volumes tumble downwards jostling for light. This topmost triangular plate, with its raised structural ribs, is the horizontal signal of the school's presence. Approached laterally, it serves as a kind of hardened reflecting pool with a surgically sharp edge between it and the sky or valley beyond.

Above the pavement, a contiguous V-section gutter runs at nun's coif height and shades the interior. This upper layer houses the assembly hall, the school's principal space which is also used by the townspeople for civic activities. It is doubly accessible, with one ramp leading (independent of the internal planning system) via a large pivoting door into its rear. Another, with typically canted handrails, drops to a central patio strategically located between hall and administration and student facilities. Sheets of glass permit the afternoon sun to penetrate the triangular communal space, transforming it into a terrace overlooking shards of roofs and landscape.

This is an elementary school for 250 students, with many coming from outlying areas. Around 50 of them board here during the week with a resultant split in the composition between the outer bulkier wing (containing the daytime activities) and a compressed zigzag of overnight accommodation. Pinos' shift downwards and through 120 degrees provides the school with the necessary privacy. The repetitive constituents of the programme both fold down - allowing each its portion of natural light - and are aligned apart so that the upper entrance has a vertiginous slot open to the lower perimeter playground. This bifurcation enables each segment to develop its own language of form through specific functional analysis.

The outer, bulkier wing houses offices at arrival level, before descending to three levels of classrooms. These rooms face rather sternly westward, opening on to a large tilted terrace and a playground on the middle and lowest levels. Hidden within, carved from the hillside, is a flurry of stairways, leading back and forth and sideways to connect the various strata of the architecture. Side-saddle to the classrooms, beneath the third flank of the Corten roof, are stacked the remaining shared activities: a library, an open work/play area with cubistic pine tables, and a curving cafeteria fed by dumb waiter from the kitchens below. For semi-independence, these decks are staggered at half-level from the classroom foyers.

Pinos' building is, in effect, an enormous foyer, a public meeting place which is in turn expansive and enclosed. Stairs are cut or cascade dramatically. Moveable concrete benches with flattened-Z profiles are liberally dispersed. Glazed screens and doors are fabricated with angled transoms as if to destabilise these chunky sections and any illusion of permanent barrier. Walls of floor-to-ceiling glass have externally applied grilles of thin vertical ribs of in-situ concrete creating a tectonic rhythm which is also, in the great Spanish tradition, a play on light and shade. These modest elements of the building process occur or are placed in Pinos' realm of interpenetrative space as functional markers, integral components of a total vision.

The classrooms pull away from the hillside (into which lavatories and stores are also buried) to create the interstitial foyers. There are two classrooms at the upper level, three on to the terrace, and then five below, where the older children can gain direct access to the play area. As the external envelope is shielded by concrete ribs, light seeps vertically from the terrace via plates of glass block and horizontally from foyer to classroom through translucent screens. This threshold between foyer and classroom with its angled coat-racks and radiators and with its mysteriously plastic light is characteristic of the project's commitment to connection. The actual rooms are furnished as in any Spanish school. In fact, this is a particular compliment to Pinos: the ability of her unorthodox design to co-exist with mundane reality.