best architects 17

The new Health Faculty of San Jorge University is located on a campus on the outskirts of Zaragoza city. Although it is a rural campus, the nature in it is scarce. The forest along the campus is the result of a man created operation. The surrounding buildings, the Rectory and Communications Faculty, respond to a contemporaneous architecture that lives besides that nature.

The Health Faculty joins the development of that little nature to reinforce the place where the existing buildings rest and where new buildings will do. The new faculty is not only another building; it becomes part of the new place. Architecture is thought as part of a new nature.

The building program is organized in three concave lines. These white and scaled lines unfold on the campus as part of its landscape. Inside, on two floors, classrooms and laboratories are organized for teaching and research. Each scale catches the light needed for each room. The dimensions and shape of rooms allow a big variability of use. Consequently, it is possible an academic reorganization in an easy way. Light coming through scales can be controlled, so digital technologies can be used inside rooms. The minor creases of each line contain the most public rooms of the new faculty: cafeteria, conference room and multipurpose rooms.

The three lines enclose a big room open to the sky. All the access corridors to laboratories and classrooms face this big room. The square gives access to the three lines. Lines look at each other through the square, which discovers the inside of this mineral complex. The inside and outside relation of the faculty gets inverted. The concave outside happens to be the most interior room, and the convex inside becomes the most exterior place.

The mineral nature of this faculty in San Jorge University offers a new landscape of white scales breathing light on the outside, and it offers a big room opened to the sky on the inside.