Projects Credits & Specs:
- Architects: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos
- Photographs: Roland Halbe
- Location: Madrid, Spain
- Area: 12,000 m2
- Year: 2022
The CEU campus in Madrid includes several university buildings built at different times for education and research. The new facility designed by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos for the Faculties of Humanities and Communication Sciences is located on a triangular site in the Colonia Metropolitana in Madrid. The steep topographic slope of the plot generates a permeable structure crossed by a sequence of open spaces that connect two access areas, from Paseo Juan XXIII and from the north of the site.
This connection defines public spaces at different levels that determine the formal structure of the building. The project offers 12,000 square meters of space for classrooms, workshops, seminars, research, and television plateaus, as well as a parking garage. The management and administration areas are housed in an original building of the Colonia Metropolitana, which has been refurbished for this purpose.
The main building, with a U-shaped floor plan, follows the perimeter of the site, opening onto a courtyard or cloister to the south, and transforming into a wide staircase or grandstand on an urban scale that provides access to the roof with views towards the mountains and the Madrid University Campus. This open-air theater and the central courtyard constitute the public spaces where students, professors, and visitors converge.
The exterior treatment of the facades by means of a perforated waved metal skin generates solar protection modulated in variable folds according to the different orientations while unifying a building that adapts to the scale of the urban context is located.
About the architects:
Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos was founded by Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano and has offices in Madrid and Berlin. Along with being widely published in international magazines and books, the firm’s work has been exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia in 2000, 2002, 2006, and 2012, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in 2006, at the Kunsthaus in Graz in 2008 and at the MAST Foundation in Bologna in 2014.
They are the recipients of the 2007 National Prize for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage and the 2010 Nike Prize issued by the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA), as well as the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2010), the Piranesi Prix de Rome (2011), the European Museum of the Year Award (2012), the Hannes Meyer Prize (2012), AIA Honorary Fellowship (2015), the Alvar Aalto Medal (2015) and Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts in 2017.
Their major works include the Madinat al-Zahra Museum, the Moritzburg Museum in Halle, the San Telmo Museum in San Sebastián, the Zaragoza Congress Centre, the Martin Chirino Foundation in Las Palmas, the Joanneum Museum extension in Graz, the Contemporary Art Centre in Córdoba, the Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia and the Montblanc Haus in Hamburg.
Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos is currently working on projects in several countries, among them, the extension of the Archaeologische Staatssammlung in Munich the extension of the Museo Sorolla in Madrid, the Archive of the Avant-garde in Dresden, the Carmen Thyssen Musem in Girona and the Cité du Théâtre in Paris.
The Description is provided by the architects.
