Villa El Libertador Príncipe de Asturias Municipal Hospital
The project is a medium complexity hospital located in the south of the city of Cordoba, in the populous Villa el Libertador neighborhood. The building responds to a need for health services for a vast section of the lower-middle class population.
The project is expressed as a "mono-material box" of exposed brick [a material that is very characteristic of the city, popularized with the projects built by the architect "Togo" Diaz] that envelopes a separate reinforced concrete structure under which are all the activities that meet the requirements of the medical specialties addressed in the program.
The building is located in a residential neighborhood of the city that is characterized by a consolidated urban fabric, with houses one and two floors high, with a regular to precarious level of construction. Responding to the horizontality of the neighborhood fabric, we propose a one-story building with a double height facade in the public sector which gives it hierarchy. It is on a flat site with its main entrance to the north.
The lot is large in relation to the proposed program, this allows for a private street surrounding the building that separates it from the neighborhood fabric, highlighting it from the environment. In this sense, to strengthen the institutional character of the building, the project is setback from the facade, generating a large public space at the neighborhood level which in turn gives hierarchy to the main facade and allows a full view of the Hospital.
In this project, the facade appears as a large "brick screen at a modified scale" which oriented northward works as a parasol. This is not the result of a random idea but part of our relentless quest to use available resources and take advantage of the structural and expressive qualities of the material, a process that will no doubt continue in another project.
We want to reinvent this ancient material which we can access easily, and find answers and possibilities in it for a contemporary architecture. Beyond its usual uses, I believe that this search is not just ours, but of great Latin American architects such as Solano Benitez and Javier Corvalán. It is a contribution and a demystification of the idea that a building of this complexity needs any type of high-tech envelopes, especially in our latitudes where there are excellent craftsmen in this trade.
Using brick as the main material not only connects the complex with the Cordoba architectural tradition, but also improves the thermal conditions inside and minimizes maintenance. The technology allows us to use local labor, which makes the project an employment generator. According to the orientations, we apply parasols of this same material that provide the necessary protection and lighting. This material has a very good behavior for the climate of the city, which has broad temperature changes.
