Creative factory: combining rational form with simple materiality, this new School of Arts in Cordoba forms the latest addition to the city's evolving university campus.

UNIVERSITY FACULTY, CORDOBA, ARGENTINA ARCHITECT MIGUEL ROCA 

Cordoboa is Argentina's second city and historic centre of learning, with one of the oldest universities in South America, founded in the seventeenth century by the Jesuits, whose need to train priests led to the establishment of a theological college. Today, with a student population of around 80 000, Cordoba's university is still an important institution and focus of local cultural life. Faculty buildings are spread throughout the city and suburbs and new elements intermittently add to the university's organic growth. Miguel Roca has made regular contributions to the ongoing development of the university (AR November 2000), creating a series of modestly scaled object buildings ('portals of knowledge', as Roca describes them) in the campus landscape, united and defined by a common architectural language. The new School of Arts forms part of this latest wave of development, providing space for the departments of drama, film studies, music and sculpture.

Each department occupies a two-storey cubic volume, broadly similar in scale, form, and materials (rough in-situ concrete combined with black oxidized steel panels). Yet each is also subtly different, expressed by variations in modelling, patterns of glazing and the relationship between the two materials. The film and sculpture workshops are more akin to blind boxes, but the main auditorium, which is used as a performance space for both music and drama, is distinguished by oblique skylights carefully incised into the black steel roof like cuts in a fabric. To ensure acoustic privacy, each department had to be physically separate, so in plan, the quartet of volumes cartwheels around a glazed central communal hall, its lightness and transparency acting as a foil to the massiveness and solidity of the departmental boxes. The hall acts as a general meeting, mingling and break out space for students, encouraging social interaction. Other communal spaces, such as dressing rooms and lavatories, are directly accessi ble from the central hub.

The internal organization of each box is a rational response to the activities it houses, based on double-height volumes for performing or making, surrounded by smaller ancillary study, rehearsal and workshop spaces. The drama department, for instance, contains a horseshoe-shaped experimental theatre, with a stage design workshop to the rear. The cinema department combines a film set with mezzanine gallery spaces for production, sound and editing. Sculpture is housed in a double-height studio overlooked by a library and reading room. The music and drama auditorium has a conventional stage and is partly lined with timber for acoustic enhancement, but this also brings an honorific quality to the principal performance space. Made on an inevitably restricted budget, the building is conceived as a kind of creative factory or work in progress, a robust armature awaiting the energy, imagination and animation of its student users.

RELATED ARTICLE: Architect

Miguel Roca, Cordoba, Argentina