A Study in Hope : New School in Tijuana Offers Model for Future

Those who don’t believe architecture can be a force for social change should visit a new school in an impoverished Tijuana neighborhood known as Colonia Esperanza.

On a rutted dirt road that leads down into this hilly community of shacks, home to some 8,000 underprivileged people, the new school, Jardin de Ninos la Esperanza (Children’s Garden of Hope), stands as a symbol of hope.

The school was designed by James Hubbell, a Santa Ysabel-based artist and architect, and its new 1,700-square-foot kindergarten and first-grade classroom building opened in September. The complex also includes an earlier-built concrete-block structure that is used for a preschool and a tiny community medical clinic.

With its wavy concrete roofs, colorful folk art tile murals, a fountain in the form of a turtle and a wall niche ringed by a mosaic of abalone shells and occupied by a tiny statue of Bart Simpson (which the children have dubbed St. Bartholomew), the new building brings welcome smiles to the faces of more than 200 students. Hubbell also added special half-round stained glass windows, wildly imaginative wall sconces decorated with leafy, kelp-like forms and delicate wrought-iron gates that pick up the organic forms of his buildings.

Comparing Hubbell’s new school in Mexico with its San Diego counterparts shows how truly boring and banal most American schools are. Christine Brady Kosko, president of the Americas Foundation, an organization she founded to fund, build and operate Jardin de Ninos, thought she could do better.

“I decided the school should be very beautiful,” she said this week at a Tijuana restaurant after a tour of the new school and surrounding colonia. “American schools are almost indistinguishable from prisons. One feature I’m totally shocked by is the lack of windows and natural lighting. I hope this sets a new standard for American as well as Mexican schools.”

Brady Kosko and San Diego architect Dennis Hartley designed the initial, functional concrete block building, but Brady Kosko wanted the new kindergarten and first-grade building to be more inspiring. She had seen Hubbell’s stained glass windows at All Souls Episcopal Church in Point Loma and was impressed. A mutual friend suggested to Hubbell that he give her a call. Within days, he had visited the colonia and developed a model and drawings for the school.

Hubbell, 60, is a soft-spoken man, but he didn’t take long to warm to the topic of school design during a phone interview from his hilltop home and studio outside Julian.

“I knew a guy one time who was designing a wonderful park in Watts after the riots, with all the people in the community involved,” he said. “Then the police told him he couldn’t do it, it had to be made so they could drive their squad cars through. The whole thing fell apart. There wasn’t trust in the community, if they know you are going to be able to drive squad cars through.

“That’s what happens with schools. We build these things because we don’t trust our children, and I think they know it,” he said, referring to fortress-like Southern California schools. “I wonder, if a teacher just did one different thing, every day brought a bouquet of flowers and put it on the table, whether that wouldn’t change how kids felt about being in school and being with the teacher, a symbolic gesture that ‘you’re great people and I’m glad to be with you.’ ”

The new school is Hubbell’s bouquet. The design is oriented toward the outdoors, bringing in fresh air and natural light.

Instead of typical rectilinear boxes, each classroom is a grotto-like space with gently curving roofs, skylights and mosaics of tile that swirl over walls and floors.

The curvy walls and roof, cast of concrete over a frame of steel re-bar, mesh and pipe, posed difficult engineering problems. San Diego designer David Klages developed a system for bending and assembling the frame, helped refine the concrete mix for maximum strength and figured out how to mold the concrete over the frame without traditional wood forms. Civil engineers from the Technological Institute in Tijuana handled structural analysis, donated concrete and helped Klages refine the concrete mix.

Essentially, the building consists of two large classrooms and an office arranged around a central courtyard that has an elevated circular planter and a tiled fountain that looks like a turtle. Tall wood and glass doors are left open to the court on hot days, and the heavily insulated concrete roof keeps interiors relatively cool.

The concrete roof also extends out over the edges of the building and reaches down to the courtyard in columns to form an arcade-like shelter from the hot sun. The columns double as built-in rain gutters, with recesses that funnel water from the roof to the ground.

At the opposite edge of the court, a trellis is supported by columns decorated with animal forms. Hubbell asked artists to design and cast 3-foot-long masonry tubes, which were brought to the site, assembled and filled with concrete to become these supporting columns.

Hubbell’s architecture has never received widespread national recognition, at least until now. A chapel he designed at Sea Ranch in Northern California is featured in the June issue of Progressive Architecture, along with a few photos of the Jardin de Ninos. Hubbell says it’s the first time the “establishment press,” as he calls architectural journals, has devoted space to his work.

In San Diego, Hubbell’s most visible designs include the Triton restaurant building in Cardiff (the restaurant has gone out of business) and the stained glass windows at All Souls.

This was Hubbell’s first school design. Initially, he was hesitant to take on the job (he donated his time and some materials), since the budget was just a slim $80,000, and his buildings are complex, labor-intensive and can be expensive. But he decided the potential long-range impact on Colonia Esperanza would be worth the effort and expense.

Thanks to affordable Mexican labor, donated materials and the volunteer efforts of the colonia’s residents, who painted walls and laid tile, the new building came in on budget; most of the money was raised from individuals, corporations and charitable foundations by Brady Kosko, who has contributed $12,000 of her own so far.

While this new school building does not resemble any other structures in the colonia, Hubbell says he found his inspiration in the neighborhood and in Mexican traditions, especially for the courtyard.

Some of Hubbell’s materials--concrete, colorful ceramic tile, terra cotta pavers--are common in Mexico. But others were bought in the United States, or donated by American companies, so the materials aren’t entirely native.

The undulating concrete forms of the building might be seen as echoing the rolling hills of Colonia Esperanza, but the school’s form also resembles other of Hubbell’s building designs.

Actually, his local inspiration was more subtle. The building grew from intuitions he had about the place.

“That particular colonia is sort of in formation,” he said. “It’s very different from our urban cities that are decaying. It’s growing slowly. You see walls going up and this changing and that changing. In a sense, I wanted to build something that might fit in really well 10 or 15 years from now with what they’re doing.

“If you see a Gothic cathedral, you know something’s possible that you didn’t know before. And I think that’s what the artist tries to do, a project where the community is into where it might go, a project that might make life more interesting.”

Brady Kosko, a graduate of Princeton (physics) and Stanford (materials science and engineering), was inspired to build the school by a Mexican girl she met while working as a volunteer in a Tijuana orphanage. Anna Rosa, a bright-eyed baby, was in danger of dying from hepatitis when Brady Kosko helped nurse her back to health and decided to adopt her. Brady Kosko moved to La Playa, just outside Tijuana, to establish the Mexican residency necessary for adoption, but just as she was finalizing the arrangements, Anna Rosa’s mother materialized and wanted the child back.

That’s when Brady Kosko visited Anna Rosa’s home and got a firsthand look at conditions in Colonia Esperanza. People live in shanties built of wood, tin, tar paper and cardboard, without electricity or plumbing. Anna Rosa, her mother and half-brother occupy one of these dark, dank windowless huts, living amid old cooking smells and the odor of humans who have to survive cramped, humid quarters.

Brady Kosko realized that education would offer the only genuine hope for Alma and others like her. Alma, now 5 years old, today attends classes with Brady Kosko’s own 5-year-old daughter at the new school.

The first buildings represent only a small portion of Brady-Kosko’s dream for Colonia Esperanza. Seventy youngsters just finished first grade. Unless two new second-grade classrooms are built by fall, they won’t have a place to continue their studies.

Eventually, Brady Kosko’s master plan, laid out by Klages, will have a second site on an incredible hilltop a few blocks from the Jardin de Ninos. There, she hopes to build a 14-classroom primary school with an amphitheater, library and gymnasium with views of prosperous downtown San Diego and Point Loma. She wants to emphasize fine arts, along with basic reading, writing and arithmetic. She estimates the cost of the primary at about $250,000, and she needs $40,000 right away to begin building the second-grade rooms on the hilltop. She is hoping for a $100,000 grant from the combined Rotary Clubs in La Mesa, Tijuana and La Jolla, but that won’t come in time for her second-graders.

Brady Kosko says there are roughly 120,000 children living in 60 Tijuana colonias that don’t have primary schools. Building 60 schools at $300,000 each would cost $18 million, a fortune by Mexican standards.

For more information on the schools at Colonia Esperanza, write The Americas Foundation, Box 6822, San Diego, 92106, or contact Christine Brady Kosko at 267-3162. Brady Kosko also invites students of architecture and construction to inquire about La Rosa Blanca, a building school offering summer workshops that give students a chance to mingle with professionals while gaining hands-on experience working on the school.