The Republican Generalitat was very sensitive to the GATCPAC proposal to define new standards that would facilitate the massive implementation of schools throughout Catalonia and some prototypes that responded to this objective began to be promoted. This is the case of the Folch i Torres School Group, which had been proposed as a prototype for early childhood education schools: it was conceived from a functional and repeatable module that allowed the schools to be sized and expanded depending on the number of students. This group was made up of two modules (two schools) that, anticipating a possible expansion, were built at one end of the site, leaving the sides free for the future connection. In the 1950s, an extension was made to the west façade, without respecting the original system of identical modules. The GATCPAC promoted a series of architectural concepts that had to be taken into account when building a school: space and furniture proportionate to the dimensions of the child, good orientation and easy connection of the classrooms with the outside, good ventilation and maximum lighting. The schools of Palau were built with these premises.

We have organised the centre into separate pavilions. One of them houses children under observation. It is the building with a patio. It allows, if appropriate, for children to play without leaving the general area. Two other pavilions receive two groups of five children each. The building near the entrance is for the administration and management. At the opposite end, sheltered between planes of the fence, we have a farm with a patio, a workshop and an irrigation raft for rainwater collected from the roofs in front of an orchard. The main purpose of the work is to move the upper level of the mound, - although the rectangular enclosure that was offered to us was very limited, - so that it can be introduced inside the work to organise all the constructions. The buildings are arranged according to the resulting slopes and each of them has its own area. The use of the variable nature of the perspectives is to be maximised. The buildings themselves coincide with the boundary of the plot and act as an enclosure. The other fences - it's a reformatory - are inside the forest. 5. The 2.5 m module (the width of a bedroom) organises the complex. The white brick, when it ages, gives an external tone to the work which is similar - but more resistant - to the clear plastering of the cultivation houses in our country.

Based on the educational and social function of the school building, we propose that the implementation of this new centre helps to structure the environment in which it is located, which is currently poorly configured from an urban point of view. The fact of opting for a single-storey building allows school life to be organised through a central axis - which gives access to all the dependencies - which acts at the same time as a transit and meeting area, with a clear vocation to be used, if appropriate, for pedagogical purposes. The solution we present proposes a modular system of classrooms and service spaces, which gives flexibility in their uses. The courtyards are determined by the same layout of the classrooms, achieving an articulated set with a marked personality. The independent access to the sports courts and the gymnasium (which can be used in a multipurpose way), located at one end of the school grounds, allows it to be used outside school hours and, perhaps, related to the future multi-sports complex which is planned to be built in Palau de Plegamans. This approach, together with the choice of materials for construction (concrete, exposed work, aluminum...), optimises its maintenance, both in terms of cleaning and the natural aging of the constructions. We also believe that the exterior should be treated with the Vallès’ vegetation.

The plot is in a low-density residential area where houses with gardens predominate, the slope was gentle and continuous with good sunshine throughout the day. Urban planning regulations allowed building more than necessary, being able to build a ground floor and two additional landings with the main restriction of separating 6 metres from the alignment of the road and 3 metres from the rest of the boundaries. The project was based on the restriction provided by the geotechnical study which indicated that the first metres of underground had a very low resistance capacity. In order to avoid a solution with a deep foundation, economically and environmentally unviable, it was necessary to profoundly rethink the organization of the house and its construction systems. We needed a very light construction or alternatively a construction that distributed the loads very evenly on the ground. The option of light construction was ruled out due to cost and above all because at the same time we believed it necessary to have the maximum internal thermal inertia to guarantee the best passive comfort, therefore the first decision was to make a house only on the ground floor avoiding load accumulations concentrated in one area of the land. The second is to use beams instead of sanitary ware to transmit the weight of the pavements and the overloads of use directly to the ground without going through the foundations. The third is to use a linear structural system, in this case load-bearing walls, that distribute the loads from the roof to the ground as much as possible. The fourth, to organise these structural walls in a completely regular way, in the form of an equidistant grid, so that the walls and foundations collect the same proportional part of the load of the building and guarantee a sufficiently homogeneous descent along the terrain. This organisation allowed the project to be pushed to the limit, adjusting to the maximum and overloading the land to its limit to achieve the heaviest possible house that had the maximum mass (inertia) allowed by the land. That the house was developed entirely on the ground floor, allowed it to be built with a simple technology of load-bearing walls with short spans, giving an optimal structural response to the characteristics of the land and above all allowing to adjust to the costs foreseen for its execution. Although the plot was already quite flat, the earth from the foundation excavations was used to finish flattening the perimeter garden at the level of the house, enhancing the interior-exterior continuity to the maximum. The freed volume under the sill was refilled with a thick bed of gravel creating a thermal accumulator with a lot of inertia that pre-treats the renewal air so that in winter the intake air is heated to cross the gravels and cools it in the summer. It was always attempted that the resolution of a problem became, at the same time, an occasion to introduce other improvements to the project. The program is distributed in ten equivalent spaces of 3.5 x 5.12. The versatility of these 18m2 and the generous relationships between them offers, surprisingly, a lot of freedom at the same time to organise the uses and allows us to imagine that the house can be used in many different ways over the years, creating rooms that can be understood as segregated or as a single large continuous space. They are spaces configured directly by the structure and by its materiality; unclad, combining ceramic brick load-bearing walls, the concrete floor and ceramic revolute roofs. All materials are structural and therefore essential for the construction of a living space. An attempt was made to solve an architecture that emerged from the minimal and necessary, avoiding superfluous elements but at the same time suggesting the maximum possible use potential. The house is just an infrastructure where users can choose the best way to appropriate it. The house was oriented and distributed internally with a predominant south-east direction to enhance direct winter solar capture, easily protect itself from the summer sun, while protecting the main garden from the dominant north-west winds and stimulating some better cross ventilation inside the house. The need for good sun protection in the summer was a good opportunity to work intensively with the vegetation creating a vertical garden, a transition between interior and exterior, between the mineral element and the plants. In this case, the vegetation works by reproducing the interior grid in the form of small deciduous vegetable chapels that, without constituting a complete exterior room, will create a stationary over-thickness that, superimposed on the ceramic construction, will prevent the summer sun from overheating the house These small chapels are organised from wooden slats that, like guardians, guide the climbers by tracing and protecting each of the openings in the house. Given that the house has a lot of mass and therefore a lot of thermal inertia, if the user does night ventilation and uses the gravel bed correctly, excellent summer thermal comfort can be ensured without the need for air conditioning. The construction is intentionally low and elongated so that it takes on slim proportions that, together with the transverse openings and the plant solar protection, minimise the impact and integrate the presence of the construction within the plot so that one has the experience that the house is not an addition, which is very permeable and is fully connected to the garden from outside to inside, from inside to outside, from side to side. The house and the garden would like to be one and the same thing, so that when you live there you have the feeling of living and using the whole plot.