Colegio CHMS

As part of a new understanding of education and in the pursuit of fostering a new thinking process in students, the school decided to evolve the subterrain space and link it to the ground and first level. Along with the expertise of the MAYER HASBANI office, flexible, inspiring and playful spaces were designed within the existing building belonging to the nineties of Mexican brutalism.

On the first level of the existing building, a new terrace, cafeteria, private room and kitchen were designed. The cafeteria is shown as a new site that in addition to its basic function, allows students to have new work and meeting spaces. To connect the program on the first floor, stairs outlined by delicate organic lines connect level one with the exhibition spaces. Downstairs, the visual and spatial textures continue through wavy walls that blur the corners and provide access to the Aula Magna, Auditorium and bathrooms.

On the opposite side of the Aula Magna, we find a striking example of how environmental graphic design and architecture combine to achieve great spatial effects: a crimson threshold frames the entrance to the new educational spaces that color the student’s vision. To one side, there is the radio booth, the media lab, two multipurpose rooms, two computer rooms and one music room. Under the premise of flexibility, the furniture that accompanies the classrooms is totally reconfigurable to adapt to the specific needs of each session, while the “makerspace” rooms maintain a manual workshop configuration for the realization of creative activities.

When crossing the crimson threshold and descending the stairs, we find one of the great articulating spaces: the media library, with interior wooden steps that break the emptiness of a great double height that dominates the space, creating a more welcoming scale and inviting a multiplicity of uses and positions to encourage the students to meet and hang. When we reach the end of the wooden bleachers, a reading and study room connects the area to the classrooms and other study rooms. On the other hand, as the height is reduced due to the original structure of the building, the existing dimensions are used to create a library where both furniture, walls and floor are bathed in a striking yellow that gives rise to a new, original and challenging model for new generations.

In conclusion, every corner within the intervention of MAYER HASBANI office manages to turn the common educational space into a new paradigm of education where architecture transforms walls into sensations and establishes a new learning process through the synergy between architectural design and environmental graphic design.