Kindergarten
Jose Marti Park. Little Havana, Miami, FL
A kindergarten for 100 children, designed by ntc.estudio for José Martí Park in Little Havana, Miami. The project sits along the Miami River on a site already defined by continuous community use, youth programs, after-school activities, daily gathering and treats that condition as the brief rather than the obstacle. Rather than replacing the park, the proposal reorganizes it: portions of the ground are lifted to a second level so public use can persist beneath, while the school is inserted into the framework above.
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.
