Kindergarten
Jose Marti Park. Little Havana, Miami, FL
Located along the Miami River in Little Havana, the project builds on an existing park defined by continuous community use, including youth programs and after-school activities.
Rather than replacing the park, the proposal reorganizes it. Portions of the ground are lifted to a second level in response to community current dynamics, allowing public use to persist while maintaining visual and physical continuity with the site.
A kindergarten for 100 children is inserted within this framework, organized around a secured core and a system of shared learning spaces. The building operates with a dual condition: closed and protected during school hours, and partially open after hours to support community activities.
Crucially, the project extends beyond the school’s temporal limits. After hours, controlled closure allows community programs to operate independently, decoupling educational and civic functions without separating them spatially. Performance spaces open toward the landscape; interior rooms expand outward through folding boundaries. The distinction between building and park becomes contingent, negotiated through use rather than fixed geometry.
What emerges is not a new image, but a recalibration of an existing condition. The project does not seek to resolve the tensions of the site—between memory and form, stability and change, infrastructure and landscape—but to work within them. In doing so, it proposes a different understanding of continuity: not as preservation of form, but as persistence of use.
