Location Zaragoza, Spain

Owner / Client Gobierno de Aragon

Year of Completion 2011

Size 36,000 sq m 

Budget 50,000,000€

The motivation for the R&D campus housing - composed of 500 one and two bedroom apartments and 1200 campus parking spaces - was the creation of relational constructs at a variety of scales between the inhabiting students/researchers, the campus, the surrounding landscape and the city beyond. Urbanistically, the R&D housing breaks always from the stringent urban guidelines to integrate the project to its campus context and extend its realm to an adjacent neighborhood. The project’s heavy demand for resident and commuter parking is seen as an opportunity to relate to the larger landscape. The parking - through techniques like pervious paving and basins- becomes a built landscape. As such, it enters a complementary engagement with the buildings aiming to blur the boundaries between the two and together at as part of the larger green system of the city of Zaragoza. At the level of inhabitation, the project sought different rich, overlapped spatial realms that would foster productive interpersonal relationships.