500 Dwellings for University Students on the Actur Campus, Zaragoza
Housing still represents an unquestioned typological universe. But the rules of this competition encouraged propositional freedom in terms of volumetric configuration, and included a significant percentage of amenities programs to be added to the residential ones. A new competition – we think – that offered the possibility of alleviating the general tedium of many of the current residential complexes, even when respecting any of the canonical types of inhabitable units.
We think that architecture was invented with communication as an end. And we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century, in the age of communication, in Zaragoza, a city that is going through a crucial moment for its future. Starting from this reflection, the effective response to the competition brief had to be based on a new image with a significant load of direct communication. An unprejudiced image that goes beyond that stale repertoire of building configurations that the architectural panorama has us so accustomed to. A new symbol of territorial scale able to endow the campus, Zaragoza, with an identity, and able to record for the future the importance of the special period Zaragoza is living today.
In the first place, the proposed building complex starts from schemes whose good performance is endorsed by experience (like the residential complexes of the North American campuses of the sixties), and can be represented with very simple floor plans, without gestures, without forms, but free from prejudice and preconceived ideas in its vertical configuration. Secondly, the whole complex is taken up by unusual forms that, when built, may reinforce the image of the campus, in order to make it readily identifiable, like the letters on the hills of Hollywood or the silhouette of the Osborne bull. But the idea is not to limit it to an identity that may end up consuming itself because it contains a strictly graphic message. What if we go beyond? What if it is possible to live within that message?
