Lucia’ Research Building

The project seeks to create a sequence of public and private spaces within and across the site generated from two fundamental aspects related to program and place. The aim of this competition is 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 displayed outside. Therefore, due to the scarcity of interior space and the type of user that will inhabit it, it seems a priority to provide the complex with spaces for collective coexistence, which encourage the relationship between the users of the community.

On the other hand, the selected plot is located in the northeast area of Valladolid. It is currently integrated in a shapeless place, which defines its attitude, empty, peripheral, but endowed to be part of the city. To solve the problem of discontinuity so frequent in peripheral areas, objectives are set, on the one hand, to provide a clear design intention to help consolidate the new image of the site and, on the other hand, to connect it conceptually and formally with the city. center.

The solution adopted is to be a hybrid between the extroverted 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 draws a green space of changing proportions that remains open and oriented towards its southern end, thus connecting with the periphery of the environment, embracing and generating a landscape continuity, while acting as a lure to the distant and fast scale of rail and automobile transport. This architectural gesture responds to the objectives set at the beginning: appearance of the community space, definition and formal orientation or connection with the rest of the consolidated city and the surrounding landscape.