A new nursery school for 120 children aged 0-3 will open in Guastalla in the province of Reggio Emilia on 19 September, to replace the two municipal nursery schools, Pollicino and Rondine, damaged in the earthquake of May 2012.
The architect Mario Cucinella, head of the firm MCA which designed the facility, sees architecture as an educational vehicle rather than a discipline subject to trends, and the Guastalla project, which earned the highest ranking in the tender procedure for the design and construction of the new building, with a modest budget of just 1,650 euros per square metre, gives full expression to this belief.
Built on reinforced concrete foundations on a single storey, the nursery school was designed and developed in such a way as to prompt children to interact with their surroundings, according to an educational vision in which nothing is left to chance, from the layout of the teaching areas to the choice of construction materials and the integration of the indoor and outdoor environments.
The rounded, cosseting lines of the architecture as a whole, and the entrance in particular, are a clear allusion to the womb and to the whale's belly of Pinocchio fame, as the designer himself points out. This new building falls into energy class A, and was built with a combination of recycled materials and natural materials with low environmental impact. The bearing structure of the nursery school, for example, is a wooden framework, for enhanced safety in the event of seismic tremors, and optimum thermal insulation.
The high degree of insulation, the optimised distribution of transparent surfaces, the use of state-of-the-art rainwater recovery systems and the installation of a photovoltaic plant on the roof will minimise recourse to mechanical systems for meeting the energy needs of the building, which can generate 45% of its energy requirement autonomously.
