Parque Educativo Querétaro

This “Educational Park” is an innovative concept in Mexico by providing education through encounter and experience. It is a campus that integrates different academic institutions and brings them together in a university community generating spaces of coexistence and synergy.

The project comprises the existing building of the Escuela Bancaria y Comercial, the sports facilities of the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, and a series of new academic buildings that will house the educational, research, and working spaces of different universities and specialized schools.

The spaces will be flexible and capable of generating synergies between the different specialties, sharing resources and catalyzing the potential of each component of the Educational Park.

Based on the concept of collaborative education and learning, a series of open areas form meeting and study spaces, multiplying opportunities for interaction between the users of the different faculties, and facilitating a university experience enriched by the vitality of this community.

 

Querétaro, Querétaro, 2016

115,043 sqm

Bodega CDT

The character of the project is defined by the powerful geometry of the square floor plan with a central courtyard and rooms arranged around all four sides. This careful order does not prevent the spatial layout responding rigorously to the program: the steps of the winemaking process are distributed in sequence.

The first wing houses the beginning of the process, including delivery of the grapes and starting point of the production. The adjoining wing is intended for fermentation tanks, from where it either continues to the barrel area located in the basement, isolated from noise and temperature changes or goes directly to the area for bottling, labeling, and corking. Finally, the finished product is taken to the cellar or warehouse for subsequent distribution to the points of sale.

The volume is protected from the outside with a blind façade of reinforced tepetate (earthen) walls, an ideal way of maintaining the optimum light and temperature conditions for the correct evolution of the winemaking process, thanks to the thermal inertia of this type of construction. Meanwhile, the rooms open onto the inner patio in order to receive indirect light and to visually connect all the steps of the program through the central void.

Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, 2016

1,585 sqm

Escuela Bancaria y Comercial (EBC), Guadalajara

A college campus is defined by its outdoor association as an integral part of the city. In this case, the project occupies the first four floors of a corporate building, creating the challenge of integrating the campus into the existing structure in a way that endows it with the characteristics of an outdoor campus. The design strategy was to make a “building within a building”: an indoor campus. Centralizing the program and freeing up the existing perimeter or façade ensures each component space receives natural lighting and ventilation, generating “the street,” the meeting space that articulates the perimeter both horizontally and vertically, ensuring the four levels work together as a new, indoor campus.

 

Guadalajara, Jalisco, 2016

6,069 sqm

Photographs: Onnis Luque