A small Mediterranean town
Though reiterated, the use of the metaphor of the “small town” to describe a University College is not less useful. The built complex that has to house the future life of 10000 students and teachers will be their urban habitat during most of the year.
So it is very suitable to refer to the best examples of urban organisms to inspire the future Campus’ design. The history of the best Mediterranean towns shows us the way: compact cohesive tissues, where meetings spaces are arranged in a tidy hierarchy: plazas, streets, lanes, loggias, porches, courtyards, etc. There we can find our references. To tell about a dense city of plazas and patios is also a way to deal with the environment in a precise way: compactness, minimum footprint and the use of the vernacular resource of intermediate spaces (mainly patios and porches) as natural mechanisms of climatic regulation.
Our proposal tries to adopt that reference by using a simple and rational geometry. A dense grid of streets, plazas, porches and courtyards is inserted at the central area of the available plot. The height of the whole is limited to three storeys so as to make vertical circulations easier and to stimulate no to make use of elevators.
Institucional image. The portico building.
One of the explicit purposes of the University government is to achieve a clear representative image of the whole from the exterior, specially “coming to the Campus from the future highway that connects it with Seville”. It would be strange to our project’s premises, which attempt for the creation of a dense tissue of streets and squares, to turn to big-scale, sculptural or high-rise landmarks. In exchange we propose something more coherent with our general concept: the first building the approaching visitor will perceive has the shape of a long portico, which builds the southern façade of the campus and frames the view of its inner activity. This great void under the portico shows the main public open quadrangle of the University. The metaphor of the institution’s transparency and its openness to society gets here an architectural shape.
The portico building is not the head of the University in a figurative sense. Il also houses its more representative and collective facilities: the assembly hall, the chapel, the library and the rector’s office. The great covered void in-between all these pieces can work as the main meeting roofed open space of the college community.
A new concept for the lecture room building
The main part of the Campus’ built area is occupied by the lecture room buildings. In our proposal they give shape to the Mediterranean town concept by means of its grid of patios, porches and corridors. Lecture rooms take advantage of the use of the patios as temperature, light and ventilation regulators, in the same way vernacular Mediterranean courtyards used to do, buy here incorporating a series of technological low energy devices.