Taller Básico: Health Faculty

The Spanish architecture studio has completed a new health school in Zaragoza's San Jorge University, which creates a landscape of white scales that breathe light onto the surroundings.

Spanish architecture studio Taller Básico de Arquitectura has recently completed the new Health Faculty of San Jorge University, integrated in a campus on the outskirts of Zaragoza, Spain. Located amidst a campus where nature is scarce, but contemporary architecture abounds, the Health Faculty seeks to reinforce the place where existing buildings rest and where new buildings will be designed. "The new faculty is not only another building; it becomes part of the new place," state the architects. "Architecture is thought as part of a new nature."

Taller Básico, Health Faculty — Taller Básico de arquitectura, Health Faculty, San Jorge University Campus, Zaragoza, Spain 2012

The building's program is organised along three concave "lines", which unfold on the campus as part of its landscape. A series of classrooms and laboratories are distributed over two floors, with dimensions and shape of rooms that allow for a flexible use. The minor creases of each line contain the most public spaces of the new school: cafeteria, conference room and multipurpose rooms.

The three "lines" enclose a big room open to the sky, which grants access to all laboratories and classrooms. "Lines look at each other through the square, which discovers the inside of this mineral complex," state the architects. "The inside and outside relation of the faculty gets inverted — the concave outside happens to be the most interior room, and the convex inside becomes the most exterior place."

Taller Básico de arquitectura: Health Faculty
Location: San Jorge University Campus, Zaragoza, Spain
Architects: Taller Básico de arquitectura (Javier Pérez-Herreras and Javier Quintana de Uña)
Design team: Edurne Pérez Díaz de Arcaya, David Santamaria Ozcoidi, Leire Zaldua Amundarain, Daniel Ruiz de Gordejuela Telleche
Developer: Universidad San Jorge Foundation
Contractor: San Jorge Ute
Completion: 2012
Cost: € 8.636.750,50
Area: 8,853 square metres

Taller Básico: Health Faculty

The Spanish architecture studio has completed a new health school in Zaragoza's San Jorge University, which creates a landscape of white scales that breathe light onto the surroundings.

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