New School of Architecture in Cartagena
At the urban level, the site for the remodeling of the ETSAE is located halfway between two major poles: the Rectorate of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena and the Regional Assembly of Murcia next to the adjacent large sports center. This intermediate condition makes it a place of passage, conducive to crossing it and getting from one place to another.
The project recognizes great potential in the negative space that surrounds the existing volumes. A space that currently occupies a few cars between the building transformed into CRAI, the Workshop building and the one that today houses the current ETSAE headquarters. This void will become a threshold, which under a high volume will allow to cross towards the inner garden of the campus. In this way, there will be an unexpected new access to the heart of the Campus garden. This new hall should be completely public, and can be crossed by a man who comes to do the shopping or by a woman who works in the Regional Assembly, as well as by the students and teachers of the school.
The new “intruder” pavilion opens onto the garden and activates it. This high volume of soil is loaded with a program that can expand into the garden and colonize it, becoming a backdrop for outdoor talks or workshops. The raised floor is projected as a dense element, locating the academic secretariat and the management of the center, in the wing that faces Carlos III street. In the area that overlooks the garden, the work rooms are projected looking out from the treetops.
The intervention on the old workshop hall is carried out fully respecting the original volume and structure. As if it were an irregular checkerboard, graphic classrooms with a wide variety of surfaces are leaning one against the other until this industrial piece is filled. The spatiality of the old nave seems the ideal environment for classrooms that will need high-rise and overhead lighting for drawing and graphic arts.
The building where the ETSAE headquarters currently resides is a piece of great volumetric rotundity and strict geometry. The action on this building could be divided into two phases: a first phase that tries to convert the existing rigid structure into spaces that are more adapted to the requirements of the new school, turning narrow corridors into non-face-to-face, complicity and exchange work spaces. of knowledge, creating intermediate spaces between the classroom and the corridor. And a second phase that would increase the existing volume by raising two floors in height.