Tucked away on a coffee bean plantation northeast of Aldea el Paraiso in Palencia, Guatemala is “The Little Mountain School,” and it has captured our hearts. How did our Kentucky design firm take such a special interest in a school tucked away in a remote village in Central America? It all started with a local businessman by the name of Doug Jones.
Jones’ 50-plus years of business experience on his resume underscores a clear passion for education reform and community service. One of his many philanthropic initiatives involves a non-profit organization called Guatemalan Educational Outreach (GEO).
“I had been working on education reform in Kentucky.” Jones said, “The Guatemalan School was a fit for me as it dealt with education for people in poor and underdeveloped areas, similar to Eastern Kentucky in many cases.”
The organization’s Little Mountain School provides a safe harbor for at-risk students. The goal of the Spanish-English immersion program is to improve children’s opportunities for the future by giving them a valuable education and diverse language skills.
Currently, GEO focuses on Pre-K, kindergarten and first grade, which was added in January 2020. Renovation and expansion of The Little Mountain School will enable the organization to reach more students and expand the ages it can serve. Recognizing the challenge of securing funding for such a project, Jones sought a way to show potential donors what their money could mean to the school. That’s when he reached out to RossTarrant Architects.
“RTA has a reputation as being a high-quality and ethical firm with community involvement,” Jones said.
Jones pitched his idea to Senior Principal Randy Brookshire. Could RossTarrant Architects create conceptual designs to illustrate the school’s bright future? Brookshire took the project back to his office, and a team of passionate designers immediately jumped in to support the cause.
“Enhancing education is rooted into the core of our architecture firm,” said Arden Cooper, Interior Designer at RossTarrant. “I think that every member of our team values the importance of improving education—both in our area and around the world.” Cooper said that she was personally inspired by the opportunity to explore how designing an educational facility in a distant country might differ from the designs on which she typically works.
The team extensively researched education in Guatemala before pen was ever put to paper. After hearing multiple testimonies from engineers, volunteer builders and even teachers in the field, the team quickly ascertained that education in Guatemala was vastly different from what they were accustomed to in the United States. For example, Guatemalan children are expected to start work at a very young age rather than go to school, and a high value is placed on their contribution to the family.
“While we identify education as being extremely important, it was very eye opening to begin to understand the values of another culture and then to apply that to design research and ideas throughout the process,” said Cooper.
Once the team better understood the community’s educational values, one of the project’s main goals became creating an architectural design that would anchor the school as a source of pride for the entire village. The building would not only need to provide a flexible learning environment for students but it would have be inextricably woven into the local community.
“If we can reinforce the value of learning to the community then the support for education may increase across the board,” said Alex Short, project designer at RossTarrant.
To kick off the project, RossTarrant’s architects, engineers, interior designers and landscape architects started with a design charrette—a creative and collaborative discussion that generated a wide array of ideas and preliminary design sketches. Short said that the process was initially approached very much like any other studio project.
“We sat down as a group to understand what the prompt was and what our goal for the project should be.” Short said that the main theme of the design process was “iterations, iterations, iterations.” The group focused on an iterative design process through which several different concepts were developed and explored.
The team designed the school campus to embody its surrounding context by integrating local materials as design elements that reflect plantation agriculture. Materials like gabion walls for instance, which are created from the local stone found in the soil when excavating, served to terrace the existing site
“When looking at agriculture, we simplified the approach into four elements,” said Jonathan Ruiz, project designer at RossTarrant, “daylight, water collection, soil and wind.”
Daylight and wind are executed with the orientation of the classrooms in mind to maximize light into the rooms with the help of the butterfly roof shape. The prevailing wind direction comes from the North, so designers made certain the campus was “open” enough to receive the cooling breeze for passive cooling/cross ventilation within classrooms and commons.
“Through passive design strategies like natural ventilation, we were able to create a concept that is both aesthetically pleasing and rooted in its surroundings.”
Students will see water being collected from the roofs at the north end of their classrooms, feeding into the farmland that surrounds the campus. Teachers will be able to use the gabion walls to showcase the quality of individual layers of soil available around the site.
This method of site integration roots the students firmly in the art and science of agriculture while simultaneously providing an additional incentive for children to attend school.
Once constructed, The Little Mountain School will reflect the natural site context while reinforcing the value of education within the community’s culture.
“These are beautiful pieces,” said Jones of the final design concepts. “Your team has done a marvelous job on this—way beyond our expectations.” His next steps will be to begin the process of raising the funds needed to make the project a reality.
“If our design can help raise awareness of the potential impact this school could make on its local community—if this school inspires an increased appreciation for education among its community—I would consider that a great success,” said Short.
