Within the Campus of the Anahuac Mayab University, as part of the educational and technological growth and updating, it creates the Innovation Center. These spaces are created as an extension of the Engineering and Design Division, integrating into existing classrooms that will be transformed into more open and dynamic classrooms. The extension runs parallel to the existing building, generating a new façade that continues with the existing route marked by the walkways of the campus buildings.
The expansion project continues that same principle of correctly oriented linear buildings where it is sought to trap the uniform light of the north and cut and protect from the sunlight of the south.
A large space generates and articulates this extension. A space where common and study activities are carried out freely. A system of co-work, co-study, co-learn, where space flows freely, activities are intertwined, actions in space are suggested. They are actions in space, which can be foreseen, but they can also be proposed, or allow others to produce diverse activities and even different exhibitions, events, celebrations. A dynamic, innovative space.
This large space is solved by means of the management of light. A series of prefabricated pieces allow the passage of light and generate a scale and an ascending rhythmic treatment. It takes the scale of the existing building and unfolds towards the access garden. A gesture of continuity with the existing buildings of the Campus, all allusions to pre-Columbian architecture.
In the formal treatment, the facades represent these two organizations, which without losing the architectural unity, seek to highlight their different functions: the new and the existing.
A single language throughout the Campus: concrete signs, in this case differently, longitudinally, horizontally. The variations in double rhythm generate different handling depending on the sunlight and the visuals.
The formal language is by means of cartouches perpendicular to the sight achieving a mass reading and allowing illumination.
Configured by means of a series of inclined cartouches, alluding to pre-Hispanic architecture and acting as mullions to the sunlight, the west façade expresses the response to the whole. With the inclined signs it responds to the area of the classrooms, and with the protruding posters in the opposite direction, to the support area. The inclination of the south façade produces changing shade effects at different times of the year, serves to protect from the sun and generates a fresh and ventilated atmosphere inside, but also generates a new reading and allusive to the total set.
The new structure is solved in prefabricated concrete in a prefabricated plant, carried and assembled on site. The final finish is already solved from the manufacture.
The structure is the formal language of the whole achieving architectural and constructive unity.
The basic intention in the constructive aspect, was to solve the project in a modulated way, allowing a rationalization of the construction process, which is reflected in an economy of the resources used for the construction of the property.
The use of apparent concrete was proposed for its low maintenance and is developed by means of prefabricated elements that provide speed in the execution and little patio of materials to avoid affectations in the daily life of the University.
