Three ideas for the Park Building and the UTDT Central Plaza.

A city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot create a city.
– Aristothels

There will be no closure

The initial question: How to occupy the perimeter of a rectangle without forming a cloister? The UTDT campus will grow by replacing the buildings that currently occupy the east and south sides of the site. If the new building is detached from the piano nobile and clearly integrates the Piazza Centrale into the park. The park of the Plaza El Salvador will be integrated into the institutional square. The park will be continuous, only separated by a lower garden that will ventilate the subsoil. The UTDT will not be a cloistered university. It will be open and will escape to the south.

The horizontal plane as utopia

The horizontality of the space symbolises the fundamental aspiration of a space of coexistence: the common shelter. It is not «flats» but vertical «squares» that make up the building. This multiplication of the urban ground will define large open surfaces that can be organised in an infinite number of ways. For this, the vertical elements will be the minimum and necessary: circulation cores, infrastructural plumb lines and movable interior partitions. The horizontal plane will be the platform for working together for the production of knowledge.

Disappear and leave traces (the perfect crime)

The Park Building does not contain vegetation, but inaugurates a point of view to contemplate it. The building contemplates the Park, incorporates it into its interior. The Park Building will be marked by the vegetation that surrounds it, as its façades will be as transparent as possible.

The Park Building will not be green but grey. Its tonal neutrality will highlight the discreet beauty of the surrounding vegetation. The almost bony bareness of the structure will be veiled by fabrics used in different ways both on the outside and inside. The structure of the building will operate as a cut-out in the landscape, like the trace left by even the most stealthy of absences. An architecture against the light.