The new building by Tuñón y Albornoz Arquitectos, located at the intersection of the two main axes that structure the university campus, creates a plaza where an active urban platform and a wooded area converge, defining and integrating the immediate surroundings with the "H" buildings and the Health Sciences complex.
Inside, the new classroom and library building (CRAI) is organized around a perimeter bay of classrooms that encloses three large voids positioned diagonally about the section. The program is clearly differentiated, with the library located in the basement, opening onto the ground floor through a double-height space.
The materiality of the new building focuses on its white brick facade, whose dual nature allows it to unify the contrasting architectural elements of the campus: on one side, the university’s first classroom buildings, made of dark brick, and on the other, the white facades of the Sports Center. Furthermore, through its proportions and scale, the project is characterized by the rhythmic repetition of thick brick pillars and deep vertical openings, lending solidity and presence to the campus.
UFV Brick building by Tuñón y Albornoz Arquitectos. Photograph by Luis Asín.
Project description by Tuñón y Albornoz Arquitectos
The new building for the classrooms and library (CRAI), within the campus of the Francisco Vitoria University (UFV) in Madrid, seeks to build a new space for teaching, where students and teachers can exchange knowledge, opening up new areas of work and research.
The new building for teaching is a palace built by people, with people and for people, which provides the spaces where teaching will take place, which must have as a priority objective, in accordance with the UFV's own ideology, the global common good and, simultaneously, the recognition of the dignity of each and every one of the students and teachers, true users of the campus.
Thus, the new building is configured as a container for academic activity, open, flexible and participatory, which seeks to intensify the life of the UFV campus, through an architecture with humanistic roots, respectful of the environment, the landscape, and the urban structure of the campus.
The result of the confrontation between the public needs of the UFV and the private obsessions of the different actors who have participated in the process, the building materializes from a permanent oscillation between complementary concepts: abstraction and figuration, gravity and lightness, materiality and geometry, tradition and modernity.
Urbanistically, the new classroom building is located at the confluence of the two main axes of the campus: the street that supplies the original modules of the UFV, and the Camino de la Luz, which will connect the building that houses Le Cordon Bleu, the Chapel, the Sports Center and Building H.
The horizontal prismatic construction of the new construction thus becomes the perspective background of the two main roads of the campus, defining, together with Building H and the Health Sciences complex, the future Plaza de la Mente, in which an active platform, of a more urban character, will coexist with a wooded area, which links the square with the nearby wooded landscape.
The new building for classrooms and library (CRAI) is organised as a compact palatial structure, with a perimeter bay of classrooms that encircle, inside, three large empty spaces arranged diagonally in the section. The three diagonal voids house two multipurpose spaces and a canteen, which allows for the expansion of the existing offer on campus. The CRAI, which operates independently of the classrooms, is located on the basement floor, opening its eyes, through a double height, to the ground floor. The programme is complemented by an underground car park.
For the façade, a white brick construction is proposed that attempts to unify the different material references of the campus: the materiality of the dark brick of the first classrooms of the university, with the white façades of the Sports Centre and the new classrooms of the university. Given the proportions and scale of the volume of the new building, a thick façade is built that makes present the constructive condition of the building, by means of three bands built by the repetition of thick white painted brick pillars, with deep vertical gaps, which oscillate at each level.
