172. UFV

The new building containing classrooms and a library (CRAI – Resource Centre for Learning and Research) on the Francisco Vitoria University (UFV) campus in Madrid is intended as a new educational space where students and teachers can exchange knowledge, defining new territories for work and research.

The new building is a palace built by, with, and for people. It offers spaces where the teaching that will wall take place should take as its main objective —in accordance with UFV's ideology— the common good, in addition to acknowledging the dignity of each and every one of its students and professors, the main users of the campus. Thus, the new building is designed as an open, flexible and participatory container for academic activity.

It aims to dynamize campus life through a deeply humanistic architecture, respectful of the environment, the landscape and the campus's urban structure. As the result of the harmonization between the public needs of the UFV and the private interests of the different agents participating in the process, the building is derived from an ongoing negotiation between complementary concepts: abstraction and figuration, gravity and lightness, materiality and geometry, tradition and modernity. In terms of urban planning, the new lecture hall is located at the confluence of the campus's two main axes: the street that provides access to the UFV's original modules and the Camino de la Luz, which connects the building that houses Le Cordon Bleu, the chapel, the sports centre and the H Building. The horizontal rectangular construction of the new building thus becomes the background in perspective for the two main roads on campus. Together with the H Building and the Health Sciences complex, it outlines the future 'Plaza de la Mente', where a more active urban platform sits next to a wooded area, connecting the square with the nearby wooded landscape.

The new classroom and library building (CRAI) adopts a compact palatial structure. A perimeter corridor of classrooms surrounds three large empty spaces that are arranged diagonally in section. These three diagonal voids house two multipurpose spaces and a canteen, helping to expand the existing offerings on campus. The CRAI —functioning independently of the classrooms— is located on the basement level, with views up to the ground floor through a double height space. The programme is rounded out by an underground car park. For the façade, a white brick construction is meant to unify the different points of reference on the campus in material terms: the dark brick of the university's earliest classrooms, plus the white façades of the sports centre and the new classrooms. In response to the proportions and scale of the new building, a thick façade highlights the building's structural condition through three bands formed by the repetition of thick brick pillars, painted white, with deep vertical openings that vary on each level.