Architecture | Esculpir el Aire’s El Jardín de las Siluetas (The Garden of the Silhouettes)

Spanish architecture firm Esculpir el Aire built a courtyard for the Centro de Educación Infantil Nuestra Escuela preschool in Alicante which acts as a visual metaphor for early childhood development.

Titled “The Garden of the Silhouettes,” one of its distinguishing features is the sense of permeability between the interior of the courtyard and the street outside. The architects, in their description of the space, call it an “oasis of imagination in the middle of an empty city. The Garden achieves this effect through vertically-banded tiles which wrap through the entrance to the courtyard into the street. This is part of the flow of the piece, which we’ll discuss further.

Flow continues as we consider the interior of the courtyard, which communicates its message of growth through a number of visual metaphors. The architects state that the tree in the garden’s center represents birth. The inclusion of blackboards on which children are encouraged to write and draw symbolizes the development of one’s creative sense. The scale of the park, as we can see in the diagram included below, comfortably accommodates both children and adults. Set against the rhythmic pattern of vertical tile which wraps through the preschool and into the outside world, we get a message that there is no boundary between youth and adulthood. Rather than stages of life that are rigidly separated from each other, it’s a steady transition, fluid.

Bill Rodgers is a Contributing Editor at CFile.

Above images: Esculpir el Aire’s El Jardín de las Siluetas (The Garden of the Silhouettes) in Alicante, Spain. Photographs by David Frutos and Jose Angel Ruiz Caceres.

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