Entre Canastas

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the importance of outdoor learning spaces for schools and educational institutions obvious. Susana Osés, architect and art teacher at the the José Frugoni Pérez Secondary Education Institute in Telde on Gran Canaria met the Spanish architect and urbanist Santiago Cirugeda at a conference and was immediately fond of the idea of creating space for and outdoor classroom with him. The school found itself in the lucky position to have a site on its plot and Susana as a highly motivated teacher and initiator of the project.

Starting by searching the school complex for disused materials that could be recycled, the teacher and students were very much involved in the whole process of the construction. The found materials – among them two basketball hoops, blackboards, tables, chairs, panels, wooden ribbons and many other things – were measured and then sent to Santiago Cirugeda, who drew structural plans for a roofed outdoor classroom. Supported by the

Department of Plastic Arts and coordinated by Cirugeda, the students aged twelve to eighteen and teachers of the school did every construction phase themselves, except for the adjustment of the main trusses, which was done by the help of a crane.

The structure, which consists 90% of recycled materials, has two disused basketball hoops as main elements. In a workshop including four workstations (measuring and marking, cutting, sanding and assembling) the mulberry wooden trusses were prefabricated by the students. Those trusses, held by the basketball hoops and mounted to the rear wall of the school building, support the discarded blackboards and sheet metal elements that form the protecting roof of the structure. The measurements of the outdoor classroom are approximately seven by eight meters, wooden trunks and euro pallets function as seating opportunities.

Besides students, there were also other teachers involved, but even parents and grandparents participated in some form to make the whole project a success. Therefore, the structure is the manifestation of a heavily social connoted project, which arose in times of social loneliness and societal crises. The outdoor classroom is almost finished (by may 2025) and is already being used as a space for teamworking events, conferences, plays, breaks, community lunches etc.

The whole project was coordinated by Susana Osés and Raquel Santana and fundamentally supported by the head teacher at the school, Luisa Santana, and the teachers (Carlos Lorenzo, Alicia Barreto). But the collaboration of more than 400 students, teachers, families and many more was the driving force of the Project.

The financing of the project was mastered through crowdfunding and collaborations. Furthermore, the Telde city council supported the project and other organizations such as the Carpinterias Jinamar S.l., the architecture department of the Universidad de las Palmas de Gran Canaria and numerous other companies which contributed in some form to the project.

Recetas Urbanas

The Spanish architect, urbanist and artist Santiago Cirugeda has been working in urban fields since 1997 and has completed numerous projects and interventions in cities ever since. His aim is to empower people and give them the ability, to design their urban surroundings. While some of his projects include self-constructed buildings following educational purposes, like the extension of the Madrid Higher School of Design, others are rather interventions at the brink of the legal grey zone, like the placement of a dumpster container used as an urban field in Sevilla.