Description

The Health Sciences Campus of the University of Granada is located to the south of the city, close to the University Hospital and other premises related to the sciences and education. Its creation consolidated a new primary locus for Granada, covering approximately 10 hectares and housing over 100,000 m2 of built space. The campus is a blend of open countryside and city – effectively a major garden populated with the different faculties and associated buildings of the university. 

The campus buildings are set toward the north-eastern edge of the plot. They measure 130m long and 19m wide, with 10 storeys in the outermost zone and three storeys in the three inward-facing zones of the campus. 

The Faculty of Health Sciences building is designed along a series of ‘folds’ in its external outline, shaped around its interior and presenting slight sweeping turns in its structure. Together, these enable the building to adapt to its environment, responding in different ways to the various spaces. Examples include the tower, built in the eastern zone of the campus as a form of dialogue with the city and its movements, or the series of large-scale balconies located in the northern zone, which provide a better urban scale. 

The Faculty features a range of courtyards, skylights, terraces, galleries, and foyers, all at different levels, which distinguish the different areas but also unify them. Thanks to this design, each ‘sector’ has its own character within the overall site, while the Faculty benefits from the greatest possible amount of public space, which fosters relationships, meetings, and exchanges. 

The overall result is a building in which unity and formal continuity blend with diverse responses to exterior relationships and interior spaces. Teaching and learning, on programmes including Nursing, Physiotherapy, and Occupational Therapy, therefore benefit from spaces that are organised specifically around key factors such as function, scale, and privacy. 

Ultimately, this is a building in which architecture and structure almost entirely coincide, and are expressed in exposed concrete in this work of tremendous simplicity, based on an interplay of materials and textures.