International Competition — Universidad del Valle, Colombia
In April 1994, the Universidad del Valle and the Colombian Society of Architects launched the Competition to design the Faculty of Integrated Arts of the Universidad del Valle, in Cali, Colombia.
The Faculty of Integrated Arts included different schools such as: architecture, plastic arts, music, ballet and dance, photography, theater, among others. It was inspired by a beautiful humanistic and contemporary principle: the integration of the arts. For an architect it represented being faced with a social project similar to the German Bauhaus of the 1920s.
We proposed a cube-cone or square cone that would be the center of the architectural complex. This huge cube, red in color, would function as a “hall of lost steps”, students from the different disciplines could exchange within it. The cube would be “the outside that is inside”, it would link the outside with the inside. Its access would be through an artistic reinforced concrete ramp and would pass under a large artistic stained glass window in an aluminum frame.
Inside you could find students painting, others rehearsing a pas de deux or others declaiming.
From this central point a large structure with a square and elongated section would cross the entire complex. This structure would have a central hallway and on both sides classrooms, laboratories, teaching rooms, plastic arts and architecture workshops.
