Product Description

AV Monografías 152 LA ESCUELA GLOBAL Global School

A school is walls and masters. Architecture and pedagogy make up the school buildings, and we want to think that their importance is equivalent. It is not so: a school can do without walls, but not without masters. If André Malraux theorized about a museum without walls which would use photography as a tool of access to beauty, Marshall McLuhan proposed a classroom without walls that would use the communication media as tools of access to knowledge, and both of them understood the absence of walls as the representation of the transfer from the physical sphere to the virtual one. However, the immaterial world of images, media and networks excludes the emotional dimension of presence, and it is precisely the aesthetic shudder of proximity or the intellectual stimulus of orality that establish the contact with the masterpiece or the schoolmaster. We can do without walls, but not without the physical space where the relationship between master and disciple takes place.

That spatial component of the educational space extends to the itinerary from home to school, a path that is usually the first close contact of the child with his or her physical context. Be it tutored or autonomous, individual or in a group, urban or rural, the passage from the warm uterus of the home to the choral precinct of the school means opening up to the world and to others, but it is also an exploration of the nearby city or fields, and these daily transited landscapes enclose as many teachings as the walls of the school, because they harbor haphazard risks and pleasurable discoveries. The school is both a place and a journey: a material journey that scouts the territory and a moral journey that opens the doors to sociability and the windows to knowledge, during a voyage that takes the child or teenager to the discipline of boundaries established by a collective environment and to the insertion of his or her personality in the demanding choreography of the shared realm.

The recently deceased Fabián Estapé – a prominent Spanish economist who was also the biographer of the influential town planner Ildefonso Cerdá – used to say that a man is ‘a mother and a baccalaureate’, a perhaps politically incorrect way of stressing our debt with family and school, essential cores of the education that enriches a person and prepares him or her to live and work in society. And both at home and in the classroom, the architecture of the spaces is not as important as the architecture of the relationships, the nature of the ties established among family members or among members of a school community. We need excellent buildings, but we need excellent masters even more, and none of this can be achieved without a greater social esteem for teachers and increased support of families to schools. The improvement of education does not reside in programs or in buildings, but in teachers. The master wall of the global school is not the wall but the master.

Luis Fernández-Galiano
Muros maestros  Master Walls

Richard Ingersoll
La escuela bajo el roble The School Under the Oak Tree

Experiencias infantiles  Childhood  experiencies

Jardín social Timayui, Santa Marta (Colombia) 
Timayui Kindergarten, Santa Marta (Colombia)
Giancarlo Mazzanti

Guardería Leimondo, Nagahama (Japón) 
Leimondo Nursery, Nagahama (Japan)
Archivision Hirotani Studio

Guardería en Fagerborg, Oslo (Noruega) 
Fagerborg Kindergarten, Oslo (Norway)
Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter

Escuela infantil en Terento (Italia) 
Elementary School in Terenten (Italy)
feld72 architekten

Escuela infantil en Pamplona (España) 
Elementary School in Pamplona (Spain)
Pereda & Pérez

Escuela infantil en el parque, Zaragoza (España) 
Elementary School in a Park, Zaragoza (Spain)
Carroquino & Grávalos Di Monte

Enseñanzas básicas  Basic Teachings

Centro educativo, Chimundo (Mozambique) 
Learning Center, Chimundo (Mozambique)
Bergen School of Architecture

Escuela Maria Grazia Cutuli, Herat (Afganistán) 
Maria Grazia Cutuli School, Herat (Afghanistan)
2A+P/A, IaN+, ma0, Mario Cutuli

Escuela en el desierto, Cisjordania (Palestina) 
School in the Desert, West Bank (Palestine)
ARCò

Conjunto escolar en La Courneuve (Francia) 
School Complex in La Courneuve (France)
Dominique Coulon & Associés

Escuela en Paredes (Portugal) 
School in Paredes (Portugal)
Atelier Nuno Lacerda Lopes

Escuela Sant Gregori, Barcelona (España) 
Sant Gregori School, Barcelona (Spain)
Coll & Leclerc

Estudios secundarios Secondary Education

Centro formativo Sra Pou, Oudong (Camboya)
Sra Pou Training Center, Oudong (Cambodia)
Rudanko & Kankkunen

Instituto en Ciudad del Cabo (Sudáfrica) 
High School in Cape Town (South Africa)
Noero Wolff Architects

Escuela Charles de Gaulle, Damasco (Siria)
Charles de Gaulle School, Damascus (Syria)
Ateliers Lion

Academia Evelyn Grace, Londres (Reino Unido) 
Evelyn Grace Academy, London (UK)
Zaha Hadid Architects

Instituto Lévi-Strauss, Lille (Francia) 
Lévi-Strauss High School, Lille (France)
Tank Architectes

Escuela secundaria en Beja (Portugal) 
Secondary School in Beja (Portugal)
BFJ Arquitectos