Description

The Advanced Technical School of Architecture is located at the top of Reina Mercedes Avenue and is the first of a series of teaching buildings that the University of Seville has on its southern campus.

The design of the building is modern, and realises the ambition of the School of Architecture to have its own premises. These, for a time, had been the former Brazil pavillion during the 1929 Exhibition. As such, it is important to understand the building´s aesthetic, which is in harmony with the urbanistic principles and forms of the time. It is also important to note the changing nature of the building, which has undergone a series of extension works and changes in usage which have significantly altered the original design. These changes reflect the plurality of ways of understanding architecture over the last fifty years. 

Following the precepts of the modern movement of architecture, the Advanced Technical School of Architecture building rejects a formalized continuous façade along the Avenue, a fact that reinforces the campus´s urban design, in quest of the ideal of combining city and landscape spaces. A clear example of this approach is the way the main volume of the building is laid out. It is rectangular and is 72 m long and 18 m wide, comprising five storeys, and is perpendicular to the Avenue. 

The use of yellowish exposed brick makes this building larger, visually speaking, and this has the effect of enclosing the opaque wall section. It particularly enhances the blind façade which overlooks Reina Mercedes Avenue. This façade is divided horizontally by decorative stone strips which cover the edge of the subfloor joists that surround the whole of the building. These elongated gaps on each of the building´s floors are enclosed with metallic carpentry and large glass panes. At 6 m intervals, metal pillars are visible from top to bottom, and these serve to connect the aprons as well as the carpentry, accentuating the modularity of the structure. 

This volume structures the building, juxtaposing it to different lower-level buildings that bear witness to the different phases of the School´s development. The complexity of articulation is characteristic of the building´s functionality. The part of the building that is most visible is the cantilever of the south-facing entrance which opens onto Reina Mercedes Avenue. This cantilever, the building´s first-floor sub-floor joist, covers the open space above the entrance porch delimited by the brick wall of the Study Room and is supported by two stainless steel-clad pillars. 

The building is entered from the side. The porch leads to the entrance hall, which opens out onto the main School staircase situated in the north-east corner of the main block. On the opposite wall of the hall, there is a doorway to another ancillary hall, which provides access to the secondary entrance to the School in Páez de Rivera Street and to the courtyard the School of Architecture shares with the School of Construction Engineering. 

The main hall opens onto the Administration Services corridor, the ground-plan of which is arranged in a North–South direction, positioned centrally and with administrative offices facing Reina Mercedes Avenue and toward the passageway leading to the secondary entrance to the School. On this passageway, there is a pergola which covers a gallery on the ground floor. The library is located on the upper floor of the Administration block. It boasts a distinctive glass gallery which overlooks Reina Mercedes Street – a more recent addition. At the northern end, the two-storey block housing the Administration function and Library is attached to the Manuel Trillo conference hall, which has no externally-facing walls and forms the corner of the School on the corner of Reina Mercedes and Páez de Rivera Streets.

The conference hall is an elegant space which departs from the structural mould of the main building to accommodate the different purposes it serves. This multi- purpose use is discernible its positioning: its shape juts out onto the avenue, with its blind wall which completes the main structure of the School, while leaving room for a landscaped border. Looking towards Paez de Rivera Street, this border running along the façade widens to provide a larger garden. On this north face, the façade adopts the modular form of the main body of the School building, also displaying the metallic structure of the façade, which is organised in 6 m-wide blind slabs – an original nod to Miesian architecture. In the module that is furthest away, nearest the narrow street entrance to the School, the brick wall features a glass enclosed aperture which forms the corner, providing public access to the hall. The hall´s foyer, accessed from the passageway, is covered by a small reinforced concrete canopy. 

The spacious interior of the Conference Room is characterised by the chromatic contrast between the cork insulated wall coverings and the striking orange paint of the visible structure, which provides very interesting geometric ornamentation. 

The secondary entrance is south-facing and opens onto the courtyard which is shared with the School of Surveying and was designed and constructed at the same time as the School of Architecture building, to which it is connected by a pergola set on square-section metal pillars. The pergola provides access to the single-storey study room which formerly housed the School refectory. A glass enclosure enables the garden to be seen from the study room and vice-versa.

On the other side of the garden, towards the west side, is the façade of the laboratory wing and School departments. The rectangular ground-plan measures 72 m long and 22 m wide and is oriented perpendicular to the main volume of the School. This three-storey wing is joined to the main volume of the School at the far western edge via a small courtyard with its own staircase. On each floor, a small stair landing facilitates circulation by leading to corridors leading, in turn, to the central access corridor along which the offices that overlook the internal courtyard of the School and Sor Gregoria de Santa Teresa Street are located. Another access corridor provides lab space on each floor.

A distinctive feature of this wing of the main block of the School is its materials: this time, in place of brick, fair-faced concrete is used. The composition of the façade changes, too, divided into three sections, with adjoining horizontal window openings. The façade that overlooks Sor Gregoria de Santa Teresa Street resorts back to the brickwork characteristic of the School although with one key difference: the reinforced concrete superstructure covering the central section of the whole length of the façade with brackets supported by a system of plastic slats designed to protect the heavily exposed façade from sunlight damage. On this west façade, the School does not follow the alignment of the route of the road, thus providing a hermetic element despite the detail of the lattice slats. 

Following this façade in a northerly direction, we find a variation in the materials and construction design of the building, as well as in the way it interacts with its setting as a result of the addition of the lecture room extension, added at the end the 1990s. This extension is an example of the contextual sensitivity evident in European architecture of the 1980s and 90s, in line with the aesthetic principles of Italian Tendenza architecture. The red brick façade which overlooks Sor Gregoria de Santa Teresa Street also features windows as per the main School building, with three openings per floor on each of the floors. In this instance, though, there are some variations in the theme, which lead one to consider the façade in a different way: namely, on the first and second floors, the height of the openings changes in the absence of aprons and in their place there are balconies with metal Venetian shutters. 

The coronament of the second floor is faithful in design to its counterpart on the original building. On the ground floor, each one of the three window openings is divided into three parts, with window ledges positioned symmetrically outside each teaching room. The third floor unveils a loggia with supports positioned on the axes of the vents and the brick surfaces. These seven circular plinths support a reinforced concrete pergola punctuated with beams positioned to accommodate the trellis feature. The aforementioned pergola provides the gallery with more aesthetically pleasing protection from the sunlight.

The exterior east-facing façade of this extension building is an example of an endeavour to establish new, more open, spatial relations within the School, in that galleries are discernible from top to bottom. These galleries, complete with a fine balustrade with rounded edges, have an open staircase which serves the first, second and third floors. The ground floor is enclosed by a steel and glass frame.

This gallery connects to a small room with a longitudinal ground-plan measuring 40 x 7.5 m positioned parallel to the main volume of the School building, which forms the north side of the small courtyard. This two-story building, which was formerly part of the sports centre, provides access to the secondary entrance to the School. While the building originally housed the changing rooms and Student Club, it is currently used for seminar rooms and offices. 

The sports centre, which forms the north-east corner of the site, is a stand-alone building that adopts the same materials and modularity as the original school: brick casing and a visible metal frame which is set back from the casing. Owing to structural requirements, the dimensions of the module are half the size of those of the School and are the same size as in the conference room. However, unlike the conference room, the corner of the sports centre does not have a metal frame but a brick face, which makes the corner look smaller. 

The roof structure Is composed of standard sheet metal, which produces a lightness accentuated by the use of glass blocks to cover the transition space. This effect is particularly visible at night when the internal light comes through the glass strip. At the north face, a large feature window spanning 14 of the 16 façade modules allows light to penetrate the inside. 

The courtyard referred-to earlier is enclosed by two main lecture theatres which comprise two storeys and are annexed to the north side of the main School building. The structure of this volume continues the lines established for the main building, but with the stark difference of the octagonal floor layout of the ground-plan which is set at an angle along the length of the School. 

The building housing the lecture rooms is the most recent addition to the site, located parallel to the main volume of the School building. It is characterised by the purpose it serves: as a support resource to the Schools of Architecture and Construction Engineering, providing space for teaching rooms, other services (toilets) and as a circulation route. Nevertheless, the building is designed to encroach as little as possible on the Schools’ shared garden. For this reason, the building’s ground floor is freed up for meeting space and for occasional academic activities to take place. Its harsh materiality, with its screed concrete and discernible intricate reinforced concrete structure on the slabs and its metal (deploye) dropped ceilings on its north side provide a neutral background for such activities, facilitated by the generous layout of the structure with its shielded reinforced concrete pillars. The upper floors are accessed by two glass enclosures located on the eastern and western ends of the building, to which the main staircase and lifts open.

The fact that the circulation nuclei are located at the far edges of the building frees up the upper floors to accommodate a single corridor on each floor, which provide access to the south-facing teaching rooms and to the toilet facilities located on the north façade. It is in these corridors where the minimal maintenance of materials is truly appreciated: a black granite floor, the reticular structure of the ceilings, use of wooden panelling for enclosing the lecture theatres, black phenolic wood panels used in the lavatories which are tiled in black vitreous glass mosaic, and coloured glass panes from floor to ceiling north-facing. Of particular note in the interior of the lecture rooms is the wooden panelling on the partitions as well as the inclusion of a dropped ceiling to enable equipment to be installed. The southern side of the teaching rooms is completely externally-facing but is protected from the effects of direct sunlight by reinforced concrete horizontal slats on the front. 

In terms of materiality, the red stone covering the front wall completes the building, along with the vertical U-glass pieces inserted in the staircase. These, jutting out from the main volume, make for a truly distinctive feature, showing the bareness of their camber concrete steps, the simplicity in detail of the clamps and the ambiguous nature of internal and external space as a result of the minimal openings between the pieces of U-glass. 

The garden shared by the Schools of Architecture and Surveying was modified by creating a new north–south-facing design comprising concrete surfaces which are intersected for parterres to be placed and for accessing the secondary entrance to the lab building. Its design also comprises three different levels. 

The architects who undertook the different projects in the building’s evolution between 1960 and 1964 were Cipriano Gómez Pérez, Rafael Fernández Hiudobro, Luis Gómez Estern, Alfonso Toro Buiza and Rafael García Diéguez.