The Bella Vista boarding school was planed and built during the second building phase of the Agronomy Campus near Cochabamba, Bolivia. The vocational center provides a perspective to juveniles from extremely poor families in Bolivia that goes beyond the common subsistence level of agriculture. The new building complements the existing agricultural school in its functions with i.e. a dormitory for the pupils, a room for the lecturer, a kitchen, a multipurpose room for dining and study as well as several individual bathrooms. Furthermore it forms synergies within the building technology. Together with the existing agricultural school the new building shares the newly constructed sewerage treatment plant, the water management system for the fields, the electricity generated by a photovoltaic system and a thermo siphon. The latter system is integrated on the roof-slope of the boarding house. The project is being set up as a collaborative design-build project, integrating local stakeholders, a local women cooperation that was trained in masonry, the future pupils of the agronomy campus and students from as well TU Berlin as the local university of Cochabamba. Consequently CODE, TU Berlin’s department for Design and Building Construction developed innovative building-structures, which integrated not only local climate conditions into the design, but moreover local stakeholders, local materials, as well as local economies and enterprises in the region of Cochabamba.
The boarding house is located on the southern section of the plot and constitutes the programmatic extension of the agricultural zone to a broadly set up large-scale Agronomy Campus. Architecturally, the boarding house relates to the design of the neighbouring agriculture school with the recurring elements of the concrete base, brick walls and a timber-metal roof structure. It also completes the areal spatially on the downward slope and forms a new entrance. This new, secondary entrance in the south-east connects the campus to the expanding informal developments of the neighbourhood, which are rapidly growing around the agricultural fields of the school. The structure of the building stands in spatial dialogue to the open fields and mediates between the public exterior and interior spaces and the private retreats for its inhabitants. The niches and offsets of the walls create additional spaces for encounter and rest. The common room is oriented towards the fields; this includes a unique view of the 5000m high Tunari mountain range.
The structural sanitary cores and communal interspaces separate the common room from the dormitory. An enclosed private patio behind the dormitory serves as a retreat for students after a long day’s work on the fields. The northern patio is a shared space and forms an extension of the common room. Both patios encompass microclimates, supporting and extending the school’s educational and vocational concept of qualitative outdoor spaces. The boarding house is composed in three distinct layers: base, wall and roof. These layers are assigned to specific materials and hence construction methods, which subsequently had to be dealt with by the students: concrete, masonry, wood. In exchange with locals and by using local materials innovative solutions to structural- and safety requirements, the building envelope and comfort issues and the building technology were developed. Because of the applied materials the building holds a high factor of recognition in the neighbourhood and beyond. It sets new standards in self-made constructions, which can be transferred by the inhabitants onto new projects. The building itself becomes a didactic play.
