UPNA Faculty of Health Sciences Contest

Pamplona, Navarra

Project Date: Marzo 2020
Builded surface: 14333 m2

The competition proposes the expansion of the current Faculty of Nursing, located in the Historic Hospital Complex of Navarra, to set up a Faculty of Health Sciences of the Public University of Navarra. The Faculty will be an emblem of academic renewal, in accordance with its status as a Public Building, linked to Education and Health.

The project emphasizes the symbiosis of landscape and architecture, through two proposals:
The Plaza-bosque, flanked by the two buildings, is imagined as a green natural space that invites you to stay. We provoke a continuity of the exterior garden, with the interior of the building. The vegetal basement penetrates, to culminate in the interior atrium, protagonist and generating engine of the project.
The Atrium-lung is an imposing 5-story high lobby, covered by photovoltaic glass and with suitable conditions for planting large trees on the ground floor and filling the upper floors with vegetation.
The atrium promotes routes and healthy interior spaces, overflows with optimism, full of air, light, nature and life. It produces dynamic circulations between the teaching areas, but it also offers happy spaces for relationships or calm spaces for rest and study.

Clear and compact volumetry. The building is configured by the central glass body of the atrium and two linear pavilions oriented in a North-South direction, recalling the historical typology of the complex. On the ground floor, the West body that rises above an open porch and turns towards the square, to receive it with the main entrance and the cafeteria. The East volume rests on the ground, with a body closed towards the interior atrium and the internal street, which contains the pathological anatomy.

System and operation. The current building and the new one will function jointly, as the Faculty of Health Sciences, Nursing and Medicine. In the neutral volume of the upper floors, the classroom teaching and laboratory research program is organized in an orderly, modulated and flexible manner, on floors 1 to 3. On floor 4 there is the simulation center, used by students, but also by doctors or people outside the faculty, it has an autonomous operation. We transfer a functional program to an architectural proposal, understanding that the value that this may have lies not only in the correct arrangement and its functional relationships, but also that we provide structural, constructive and compositional solutions that help to obtain the best conditions for use by students and teachers.