PRESENTATION OF THE ESKORIATZA CAMPUS RENOVATION AND EXPANSION PROJECT
PRESENTATION OF THE ESKORIATZA CAMPUS RENOVATION AND EXPANSION PROJECT
PRESENTATION OF THE ESKORIATZA CAMPUS RENOVATION AND EXPANSION PROJECT
Construction will begin in January of 2019 and will be completed in time for the 2020-2021 academic year.
On September 21, the Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences of Mondragon University presented the architectural expansion and renovation project for its Eskoriatza campus.
Eskoriatza mayor Jose Ramón Zubizarreta, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences Begoña Pedrosa, and architects Itziar Imaz and Ibon Salaberria participated in the presentation, which took place on the Eskoriatza campus.
Construction to renovate the Eskoriatza campus will begin in January of 2019 and is predicted to be finished in time for the 2020-2021 academic year. The project has a total budget of 6 million euros.
Project goals
The expansion and remodeling project has three main purposes: to renovate the Dorleta building, to create new spaces, and to restructure the Eskoriatza campus.
First, the plan is to completely renovate the Dorleta building, which was built in 1976, in order to deal with the growth that the Faculty has seen in addition to making it more efficient and adapting it architecturally to the innovative model of education put forward by the Faculty.
For this purpose, a 5.6-meter-wide addition will be added to the south façade of the Dorleta building and, following a “beach” concept, open, adaptable, and multipurpose spaces will be created to facilitate learning and teaching processes and to help to inspire new ways for the users of those spaces to interact with each other.
Furthermore, a new 1,800-square-meter single-story building will be built next to the Dorleta building. This new building, among other services, will include multiuse rooms that can accommodate up to 140 people, and the KoLAB laboratory, the new center for educational innovation in a digital society launched by the Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences. KoLAB will serve as a meeting point for research and experimentation, as well as for sharing and transferring knowledge in the interest of promoting the transformative capacity of education in a digital society.
Additionally, the project will restructure the area around the Dorleta building in order to provide better service and a more pleasant space for the university members who use it and for the town of Eskoriatza in general. Thus, this renovation project hopes to achieve a more open, useful, attractive, and above all, natural campus. For this purpose, open-air terraces, gardens and green areas are particularly important in the design of this architectural project, and special attention has been paid to the area around the river and to the nearby promenade.
Participatory design process
The architectural project presented on September 21 was the result of a group assessment process implemented during the 2016-2017 academic year, and in fact, Faculty students and workers participated in the reconsideration and design of the new spaces. From this group pedagogical-architectural reflection, the most desired characteristics of the architectural project emerged: to create spaces that will help people to form better and closer personal relationships, strengthen the cooperative spirit, facilitate both collective and individual work, and help to transform society through education, all while placing people at the core of the project.
Once the presentation of the project had finished, some 100 workers and students from the Faculty visited a series of panels on the campus explaining both the group assessment process and the architectural project. All morning, they shared in a dynamic whose objective was to help them imagine the new campus and visualize the contributions made during the design process.
The Eskoriatza campus architectural project was directed by Faculty professor Itziar Imaz and architect Ibon Salaberria, both from the Beste Arkitektura Agency.