2024
MCHAP
Campus Universitario Lima Norte UCSUR
Plan A
Lima, Lima, Peru
March 2023
PRIMARY AUTHOR
Michele Albanelli, Jorge Losada, Mario Ricci, Marta Maccaglia (Plan A)
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
Equilibrio3 Structural Engineering (structural engineer), Vital Ingenieros (MEPF engineer), Paisaje Vivo (landscape architect), Claudia Paz Lighting Studio (Lighting Design), Plan A: Jahir Velezmoro, Akemi Cabrejos, Carlos Vasquez, Daysi La Madrid, Kelly Nuñez, Majo Chinguel, Fabio Rodriguez, Ana Lucía Díaz, Franco Ferraro, Joselín Cueto (Architects and Interior Designers
CLIENT
Universidad Científica del Sur
PHOTOGRAPHER
Renzo Rebagliati, Eleazar Cuadros
OBJECTIVE
The Project’s commitment with the construction of city and the sense of citizenship takes shape in an educational infrastructure with civic vocation. The project negotiates the boundary between the private and the public domain by restoring 17% of the available area for public uses and equipment. Due to Lima's highly seismic condition and the vulnerability of the self-made built environment, the educational buildings are classified as 'essential infrastructure,' where the population must find shelter in case of emergency. This consideration informs the project's material and structural definition. A reinforced concrete structure with precasted slabs is complemented with a light facade system of fiber-based panels and the steel structures that wrap the tower to give shade and facilitate maintenance. The system of buildings is organized by three main bodies: The plinth, parallel to the Panamericana highway, oriented East-West, absorbs the airtight programs and draws the limit of the campus at a pedestrian scale; the tower, oriented south-north to provide natural lighting and cross-ventilation, while reducing the acoustic impact of the traffic, contains the classrooms and defines the image of the building at a metropolitan scale; the theater shapes the corner of the plot and opens to the plaza. A system of woven intermediate spaces articulates the relationship between the different programs: the laboratories, shared and administrative programs (ground, 1st floor), the classrooms (2nd to 6th floor). The productive landscape is conceived as an open laboratory for local identity and research. The built project is the first stage of a long-term masterplan.
CONTEXT
The long-stretched plot (10,900 sqm) is located in the district of Los Olivos, north side of Lima, a land that has gone through a radical transformation in the last 70 years: from rural-agricultural to high density urban environment in constant organic growth. Despite its quantitative significance in size and population on a global scale (Lima hosts 10 million inhabitants, a third of the total population of Perú, being one of the cities worldwide with the fastest growth rate in the last decades), this context is remarkably young in urban terms, in the process of shaping its identity and structure, through agreements and negotiations that are projected onto and affected by the built environment. The region's youthfulness contributes to a dynamic and effervescent atmosphere, marked by palpable energy and activity within the community. The Project incorporates the diversity and the memory of the context within the architecture of the campus, conceived as a system of buildings and relational spaces that weave through the whole project connecting people, programs and spaces.
The University Campus articulates the threshold between the Panamericana Norte Highway on the east side and a residential low-rise high-density neigbourhood on the west side, responding simultaneously to the Metropolitan scale and the pedestrian scale of the “barrio”, through a building that negotiates between contexts and produces a new one. The mild and arid climate of the context informs the project’s strategies on energy and confort as well as the implementation of a productive landscape based on vernacular species.
PERFORMANCE
The project aims to be a model in an urban environment where the limit between the private and the public is very sharp both in physical and symbolic terms. So, the educational infrastructure is conceived as a civic place that responds to the complexity of the context and produces a new one.
The footprint of the project pushes the public space into the area of the campus, providing benches, vegetation and shadows to pedestrians. This design operation has triggered a vibrant and diverse use of the public space for interaction and small local commerce. On a larger scale, since the beginning of the construction, a whole system of new local services has opened in the neighborhood, providing variety to the surrounding residential areas.
We conceive education as a relational process and so the project works. The building promotes interaction as the base of learning processes through a sequence of intermediate spaces that pull the essence of the city into the campus: the plaza, the boulevard, the amphitheater, the stairs, wide corridors, balconies and a hanged garden where people meet informally yet intentionally.
The project of the landscape introduces a variety of productive native species that provide a field of experimentation for the students, while recalling the rural identity of the context and inviting the neighbors to participate. The open areas are organized in different levels, the trees and vegetation (ground floor), the orchards (third floor) and hidroponic greenhouse (top floor). The Project is certified for the energy efficiency.
