The program that is developed in the current university block of the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena is summarized in a series of buildings that have been needing an aulario-rucksack to meet the growing needs over time. Except for a free space, with a disorderly landscaping, the rest of the UPCT Campus is an accumulation of buildings arranged without urban intentionality. The competition proposes, trying to amortize the existing, reach a roof of ten thousand square meters where to host the new headquarters of the School of Architecture and Building, building where and how you can, but respecting the heart of the existing square.
The project is inserted within the block in a decisive and evident, immediate, almost unthinking, decanted way: a cloister that is a cloister. A CLAUSTRO that not only promotes the express request of the PLAZA-CORAZÓN sheet, but also sinks its supports in the bed of the old interior sea to transmit the story in its section. Under this cloister, the public space flows and, through a Mediterranean forest, which serves to explain the identity of this place, we can go to the different buildings of this university block. The square, the cloister, is at once the great hall that somehow announces that we are in one place. THE CAMPUS ALFONSO XIII.
The decisions are never linear and more in this case, where we saw that the buildings that we were asked to incorporate into the proposal, had very different capacity and constructive formality. On the one hand an eclectic building of good dimensions in its cradles and ceiling height, although with a contaminated patio, and on the other hand, a number of ships in series, which, although having a certain spatial quality, was still the scene of a certain Historicist nostalgia. Among these assessments and the analysis of the program, we decided to propose that the building of the current school be dedicated exclusively to lecture hall, laboratories, models and work rooms with their respective service spaces, taking advantage of their current constructive and infrastructural characteristics, Rescuing the patio as the good space, identity, from where to register all the uses of the building. This central space, covered, excavated, with bridges, walkways and elevator becomes the HEART of the new aulario.