A courtyard in the middle, two modules, each with its own front door, and on the façade the sage green that gives the entry its name. “Sage Green” is what we entered in the public competition for a secondary school in Teatinos, Málaga. The challenge was the land itself: the full ESO and Bachillerato programme (lower and upper secondary), plus a sports court and playgrounds, had to fit on a plot zoned for public facilities, hemmed in by major roads and recently built housing blocks. The answer was to make the building compact and free up the ground.
The brief: a secondary school in Teatinos
Teatinos is one of the fastest-growing districts in the city of Málaga. It is home to the University of Málaga campus and the Virgen de la Victoria University Hospital, surrounded by new-build blocks of flats. The area’s network of state schools had fallen short, and that is where the competition came from: there were not enough secondary-school places for a young population already living in the neighbourhood.
In a competition for a state school the programme is not up for negotiation; it is handed to you. Classrooms for ESO (lower secondary, ages 12 to 16) and Bachillerato (the two pre-university years), a library, a multipurpose hall, a dining room, administration, a sports court and playgrounds. The plot, set among other public facilities, major roads and recent residential blocks, left no room to spread out.
The proposal: a central courtyard and two separate stages
The first decision was to build compactly: clear volumes with a small footprint, so that the ground saved goes to courtyards, playgrounds and the sports pitch rather than to corridors. On a tight plot zoned for public facilities, open space is the scarce material; the building is the part you can compress.
From there, everything is organised around a central courtyard. It is not a gesture: it is the mechanism that distributes the flow of pupils and the reason every classroom gets natural light and ventilation. The two stages, ESO and Bachillerato, occupy separate modules with their own entrances: two age groups with different timetables have no reason to share a front door.
Separation uses up entrances and perimeter, and that has to be accepted. It is offset by concentrating the shared rooms — library, multipurpose hall, dining room and administration — in the common spaces that link the two modules.
Envelope, climate and accessibility
The envelope alternates solid panels with glazing protected by solar-control systems, according to orientation. In Málaga, orientation and shade do more for comfort in a classroom than any air-conditioning plant, and that work either happens in the design or it does not happen at all. Cross-ventilation and solar shading are sized to cut the building’s energy demand, not to look good in the render.
The multi-sports court and the playgrounds are sized to the regulations the Junta de Andalucía — Andalusia’s regional government — sets for secondary schools, and those rules settle most of these debates before they start. Accessibility is resolved in the same move: accessible routes, stairs and lifts sized for intensive use (a secondary school empties its classrooms all at once, not one by one), and signage built into the design rather than stuck on afterwards.
The sage green that gives the entry its name appears on the envelope and in the key spaces. It is not a last-minute decoration; it is how the school is recognised from the street.
Where it ended up
“Sage Green” remained a proposal. It is an entry to a public competition, not a completed building, and that is worth saying plainly. What survives a competition is the judgement — how to read a tight plot zoned for public facilities, how to separate stages without duplicating the building — and that judgement gets reused. It is the part of the work nobody sees, and the part that ends up being put to use in the next project.
Gallery
Project data
- Typology: Architecture competition — public educational facility
- Use: Education — secondary school (ESO and Bachillerato)
- Location: Teatinos, Málaga
- Status: Competition proposal. Not built
- Klic services: Proposal for a public architecture competition
Other Klic Arquitectos projects in Teatinos and Málaga
The studio has also worked on other projects in Teatinos, such as Promálaga Teatinos, a multi-family housing scheme in the same district. Elsewhere in the city of Málaga, Klic Arquitectos works on residential, public-facility and heritage projects such as MOSS in the centre, Casa Duquesa de Parcent and the La Equitativa proposal facing Calle Larios.
