An invisible school has opened up in Spain that appears to be half the size it actually is. ABLM, a Spanish architecture studio has used mirrors to make the school appear invisible so that the small inhabitants could relate to it. The top floor is made up of mirrors and other reflective surfaces that manage to reflect the sky.
The bottom part of the school is made up of candy-colored stripes. This colorful setting aims to represent the diversity amongst the children that will be going to school here. The preschool and primary school is in the Salamanca county of La Armuña.
“The almost invisible school proposes a reflection on the domestic scale of this kind of infrastructures, where the little ones must find spaces that they can catch and places with which they can dream,” said architects Arturo Blanco and Laura Martínez of ABLM Arquitectos.
The entrance to the school is made up of the same reflective material as the upper floors of the building. This invisible material is an aluminium composite sheet with a highly reflective finish. Ceramic tiles are used in the colored lower portion of the invisible school.
The designers built the invisible school in the region of Salamanca as it is going through an industrialization process. This process has caused large factories and commercial areas to spring up. They wanted to protect the image of the peaceful community. This is why they chose to set up a school that looks half in size rather than building another large imposing building into the landscape which is losing intimate space fast.
Blanco and Martínez explain: “In the metropolitan area of the city of Salamanca, the municipality of Villares de la Reina stands out for its transformation during the last decades as it has one of the industrial estates of the city.”
