The forceful structural decision is one of the singular aspects of the building, capable of expressing a lot with very few elements, doing it through a modern process. The building is presented rising generously and following a triple structural module. It is developed following a grid that organizes it spatially, ending as a "modern classic" with a terrace over the city.
The project combines, on the one hand, a large volume on Avenida Figueroa Alcorta, with its grid of imposing columns and capitals, and on the other, the sheds with its series of porticos and corbels.
Description of project by Josep Ferrando
The proposal for the new building of the Torcuato Di Tella University presents itself as an organization rigorously open that integrates campus diversity into a single spatial and structural system.
The property contains particular rhythms and sequences: on the one hand, the large volume on Avenida Figueroa Alcorta with its grid of imposing columns and capitals; on the other, the sheds with its series of porticos and corbels. The proposal combines both orders proposing a modularity integrated in the cloister of its location.
Tectonics becomes the base matrix for the austere but multifaceted expressiveness of the building. In an ascending sense, it presents a tripartite organization, in which each part adds one floor to the previous one, while the number of structural supports triples and doubles, successively, in response to the spatial needs of the uses required at each level, and giving a growing slenderness to the whole.
The building becomes lighter as it approaches the ground, enhancing transparency in the transverse direction between the patio and the street, and solidifies as it detaches in correspondence with the longitudinal organization of the interiors.
In favor of a dual purpose of spatial specificity and versatility, the structure accompanies the trends of the program without becoming prescriptively functionalist, and, together with the facilities, occupies the perimeter of the building, freeing the floor plan, but modulating it and influencing its scale of repetition. A complementary relationship is established between them: while the structure loses dimension due to the reduction of loads supported when ascending, the facilities lose dimension due to the reduction of their ducts as they descend. The envelope thus presents a thickness that gives both general rationality and openness over time.
The tense organizational serenity that results from embedding and matching dissimilar rhythms, from the entire campus to the definition of the interiors, characterizes at the same time that it gives the new building the capacity to integrate the campus of which it is a part.
