“Pinocchio Children’s Library”
International Competition
Sentieri Arquitectos
December 2017
Pinocchio lives between good and evil, between what a responsible child should do and what a naughty child wants to do. It is in a continuous duality. The continuous duality of the human being between good and evil. And the continuous duality of architecture: sun and shadow, transparent and opaque, tectonic and stereotomic, ligth and heavy, glass and ceramic…
What is the house to guard the most important fairy tales in the world? How to define a space tailored to the child to discover the possibilities of space? These are the questions that Pinocchio Children’s Library asks, inviting us to go back to the magic horizon of the fairy tales and the stories. Only being children again, being Pinocchio, can we rediscover the sense of wonder and fantasy necessary to design a stimulating place, built to play and have fun but above all to grow up and learn. A place that display the noble project of the Foundation to build the society of the future by cultivating the most powerful and endless of childhood resource: imagination.
And that world is what the project wanted to reflect: the world of the rational versus the sensory world, the world of the reality versus the world of dreams, of what seems to be versus what it is, light versus heavy, opacity versus transparency. Because reality is interpretable and children must learn to discover it, to feel it. The built volumes emerge as independent, transparent lanterns, which let you see through their glass enclosures what happens through them. It is the world of the evident, of the transparency and the tectonic. Our intention is to maintain the feeling of being in a park. Following this idea of dualities, the rest of the program is buried to generate the world of dreams, of the opaque and the stereotomic.
Pinocchio Children’s Library invites to turn the child into the protagonist of his creative action, imagining a spatiality to appropriate, a spatiality that educates, that in the plane of access is transparent, immediate, but with reflections that allow to see the passage of the seasons, the changes of light, and intuit that something happens beyond. And the child and the adult pass under a large suspended volume, which seems to float, and through a sculptural ramp, they enter the world of the unknown, which guided by patios and lanterns, allows to discover another dimension through the imagination: the one that provides the architecture and, also the literature.
Collaboration with Carla Sentieri, professor at the ETSA in Valencia and Alba Cariñena
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