Terrassa Secondary School

The building is located in Can Parellada, a residential estate in Terrassa, on a site facing the Serra de Galliners Park.

The school adopted a comb technology with a central core four storeys high, from which three other wings stem, each on a different level, according to the variations of the ground level.

The central core contains the school’s communal facilities such as the entrance hall, offices, library and cafeteria. The wings are formed by classrooms on the upper floor, and workshops and laboratories on the ground floor. The different bodies of the building define a series of landscaped courtyards around them, and these make up the educational spaces. The sports area consists of a gymnasium and a sports field which function independently, thereby providing services to the rest of the neighbourhood outside school hours.

In this case we manufactured the module. The manufacturer was a workshop that worked really well with corten steel, and we already had a structure of bare concrete. We worked with both these materials, the bare concrete laid out the rhythm to be repeated, and the corten steel sheets adapted themselves to the concrete.

We did the boundary with the sculptor, Ernest Altés, and our intervention was minimal. We were attempting to attain something to offset the corten steel sheets, we wanted to find a counterpoint to the horizontal component. I think that when you get to the school you can appreciate it.