MuNa/narratives/03-school-group.md

School Group / Children's Narrative — Casa de la Memoria Andina

Viewpoint: a school group — teacher, chaperones, and children from roughly six to sixteen years old — visiting the museum for the day.

For the shared facts underlying everything below — site data, the CR1/OP2/OP4 color and ornament systems, materials strata, and the full named-realm mapping — see ref/project-chassis.md. This narrative extends the school-group moments already present in narratives/01-visitor.md (the Civic Atrio sized to absorb school groups, the Great Hall stair as gathering point) and the educator spaces described in narratives/02-staff.md; it does not redescribe those rooms differently, only from a child's eye level and pace.

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Arrival: the bus, the atrio, the count

The bus stops where service and drop-off traffic is kept visually subordinate to the entrance portal, exactly as narratives/01-visitor.md describes for all visitors — no separate "school entrance" is needed, because the Civic Atrio was already sized, per that narrative, to "absorb school groups and a daily attendance in the tens of thousands." A teacher doing a headcount before the portal has the low sitting walls and planted terraces (pattern 106 Positive Outdoor Space) to gather thirty children without spilling into the street, and the activity pockets lining the atrio's edge — the kiosk, the bookstall, the sheltered benches (pattern 124 Activity Pockets) — give restless children something to look at while the count happens twice.

Threshold, at child height

The zaguán's staged transition — street to portal to cool dim passage to sudden sunlit patio, described fully in narratives/01-visitor.md — reads differently to an eight-year-old than to an adult: the change from bright street to shadowed passage to bright patio again is a more dramatic sequence of thresholds when your own vantage point is lower. Ornament density peaking at the portal (ref/project-chassis.md §1's OP2 rule) puts the chakana-derived stepped mouldings and door pulls closest to the ground right where the portal is thickest with detail — which is also, at a child's height, where they are easiest to see and touch.

The Great Hall: the stair as the day's gathering point

narratives/01-visitor.md describes the main staircase as "a room in its own right... where school groups assemble, talks are given" (pattern 133 Staircase as a Stage). For a school group this is the anchor of the entire visit: the broad, shallow steps near the floor function as tiered seating built into the architecture itself (pattern 202 Built-In Seats — tested, per that pattern, for a spot people actually want to sit in, not merely one that looks like seating). A guide can address thirty or sixty children at once without a microphone, and — because the perimeter of the hall "drops to a human register" (narratives/01-visitor.md) — the alcoves and window seats around its edge let a chaperone keep a wandering child in sight without leaving the group. From the upper landings, repeated views back to the entrance patio (again per the Visitor narrative) mean a child who gets briefly separated can re-orient by sight, toward a place, not a floor number or a sign.

Moving through the collections at a child's pace

The building thoroughfares (pattern 101 Building Thoroughfare, 4.5–6 metres wide per ref/project-chassis.md) are wide enough that a school group moving as a loose cluster does not block individual visitors, and the "several parallel loops" narratives/01-visitor.md describes — a group can peel off into the archaeological loop while another group is in the historical Corredor of Time — mean two school groups from different towns never have to queue behind each other through a single forced route.

In the archaeological wing, the small gold piece "in a low, protected niche at close range" (narratives/01-visitor.md) is exactly the kind of object a child can approach at their own height without a rope barrier looming overhead; the monumental stone in its taller vaulted chamber gives the same group an experience of scale in the other direction. The restrained trapezoidal door-thresholds mentioned there are subtle enough that a class doesn't need them explained to feel a room has changed register.

Along the Corredor of Time (the historical wing, per ref/project-chassis.md §2), the periodic common-room expansions described in the Visitor narrative — "where groups can rest and rejoin" — are where a school group actually stops for its scheduled break: built-in seating (pattern 202), daylight, and a view, sized for a class rather than a single family. A teacher can hold a short discussion here without leaving the route or needing a separate room booked in advance.

The education wing: workshops as the day's second half

Per narratives/02-staff.md, the education wing holds the educators' preparation room, materials store, and office, opening onto the same court the café faces. For the school group, this wing is where the day's structured workshop happens — object-handling sessions using teaching replicas prepared by the educators described in the Staff narrative, in a room scaled and furnished for groups of thirty rather than the individual-visitor scale of the galleries. Because the educators can watch the Civic Atrio and Great Hall stair through window bays (narratives/02-staff.md), a workshop can start the moment a group arrives without a chaperone having to go looking for staff.

Outdoor time: patios as recess, not just scenery

Every named court in this building is a real outdoor room, not a view seen through glass (pattern 115 Courtyards Which Live), and for a school group that matters practically: the Patio of Origins and the Garden of the Arts (ref/project-chassis.md §2) are places a class can be released to move, sit, and eat a packed lunch between gallery sessions, under cover if an afternoon storm arrives, per the same corredor-shelter narratives/01-visitor.md describes for all visitors. A tired six-year-old gets a change of pace and daylight before the next room, not another corridor.

What this avoids

Per ref/critique-failures.md, school groups are the stakeholder most exposed to two named failures of the winning proposal: inhuman scale (failure #7 — "look how small the people are compared to the mass") and illegible circulation (failure #10 — nobody able to tell what kind of building they're in). Every element above — the human-register hall perimeter, the built-in stair seating, the named realms in place of floor numbers, the child-height ornament at the portal — is a direct, pattern-grounded answer to those two failures specifically, not a generic "child-friendly" gesture.