AN INVISIBLE BUILDING. NEW LECTURE ROOM BUILDING OF THE FACULTY OF LAW OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ZARAGOZA (1983-1996)

Abstract

In 1983, the team formed by Saturnino Cisneros Lacruz, Juan Antonio Carmona Mateu, Manuel Fernández Ramírez and Isabel García Elorza began the construction of the extension to the Faculty of Law of the University of Zaragoza. The need to build a new lecture room building arose from the progressive increase in law students that had been taking place in Spain since the 1960s. The new building’s formal autonomy, together with its bold circular geometry, testifies to the authors’ will to break, in a respectful way, with the regionalist rationalist architecture that Regino Borobio and José Beltrán Navarro had built in the early 1940s, which had dominated the development of the University Campus of the city of Zaragoza. With formal Aaltian concomitances and echoes of Fernando Higueras’s architecture during the 1960s in the national context, this extension proposed a late-modern architecture akin to Alison and Peter Smithson’s Brutalism, where the spaces of relation and social exchange became both essential and defining aspects of the project. The extension combines autonomy with subordination, both physical and functional, to the original building, generating a piece that combines volumetric rotundity with friendliness towards the user, a piece whose perceived scale belittles its enormous mass.