CEU San Pablo University building in Alcorcón, Spain+
2022-
Alcorcón-Spain
5.672 m2
The building that houses a school of architecture, perhaps more than any other of an educational nature, must express the values of clarity and efficiency. In our training, “coeducation”, learning from our peers, is as important as direct teacher-student teaching. We learn through exchange. That is why we refer to the space where we work in the projects as “workshops”. Places where we work together. Thus, these teaching spaces, together with laboratories and classrooms, must be arranged in a rational way, in visual and spatial continuity, so that they can be integrated and adaptable for uses that are not always regulated. Places that can be easily adapted to changing functional requirements over time.
It is a matter of the project transmitting the concept behind the idea of economy as a useful attitude and, today actively desired, applied to the practice of architecture. Architecture, from its ideological assumptions, must aspire to a balance between means and ends. Between resources used and objectives achieved. And this is not understood as something reductive but as a synonym of a creative and proactive attitude. Only a relationship in which the ratio between means, conceptual and formal, and results, is adjusted, allows us to begin to speak of “goodness” and “beauty” architectural. It is not enough, but it is necessary. This is the true meaning of the term “economy” applied to architecture. It is not so much a quantitative principle, but an ideological one. We must therefore propose a building that is “sensible” from the functional and structural logic and, therefore, formal.