‘LUCIA’ RESEARCH BUILDING

‘LUCIA’ RESEARCH BUILDING

Lucia is the proposal to develop a new University Hub for Applied research centers.

Valladolid, Spain 2010.

The project seeks to create a sequence of private and public spaces within and across the site and generated from two fundamental aspects related to the program and the site. This competition is intended to build an important university center with the objective of linking research in direct contact with society. The character of this building is therefore clearly collective: research centers inhabited by researchers and shown outside. Therefore, due to the shortage of interior space and the type of user who is going to inhabit it, it seems a priority to provide the group of collective living spaces, which encourage the relationship between users in the community.

On the other hand, the selected plot is located in the northeast area of Valladolid. It is currently integrated into a place without form, which is defining its attitude, empty, of periphery, but endowed with becoming part of the city. To solve the problem of discontinuity so frequent in peripheral areas, objectives are set on one hand by providing a design intent in a clear way that helps consolidate the new image of the place and, on the other, connect it conceptually and formally with the city center.

The solution adopted is to be a hybrid between the exempt and extroverted building typical of the periphery and the traditional courtyard scheme. The object is summarized in a building that in its development draws the perimeter of the plot, and in its interior it draws a green space of changing proportions that remains open and oriented towards its southern end, thereby connecting with the periphery of the surroundings, embracing it and generating a landscape continuity, while at the same time it is acting as a claim to the distant and rapid scale of rail and car transport. This architectural gesture responds to the objectives set out in the beginning: appearance of community space, formal definition and orientation or connection with the rest of the consolidated city and the surrounding landscape.

DESIGN TEAM

Sergio Álvarez

MODELS
Sergio Alvarez