IBERDROLA

Narratives

Educator Narrative

The Educational&Sustainable Campus in Madrid has the main goal of “teaching” its users and the surrounding community about these values: sustainability, renewable energies, sensitiveness towards Nature&environment, and architectural harmony.
Enhance teaching and learning and accommodate the needs of all learners
The Campus, promoted by an Energy company, enhances the cooperative learning of their employees, directors and researchers in the field of renewable energies.
Architecture is a tool for learning: bioclimatic technological solutions will transmit sustainability values.

Serve as a center of community
The Campus includes a residence for temporarily stages (courses of several weeks), physical formation (indoor swimming pool, gym), research&lecture classrooms, and energy installations to investigate (solar panels, windmills, hydraulic and geothermic systems, etc.)
All the users needs are covered, both for their quality of life and for their technological formation. It encourages use after hours, offering services for recreation and wellness.
Result from a planning/design process involving all stakeholders
The planning process involved specialists in renewable energies, educators, language professors, urban planners (adapting the Campus to the adjacent municipality -San Agustín- urban plan), botanists (select indigenous species —sustainable-), and technicians in recycling.
Provide for health, safety, and security
The Campus is conceived in a first stage (later to be spread over the context) as an “oasis of sustainability”. It provides healthy spaces, safe and secure enough for all users. It is 100% pedestrian: traffic stays outside the intimate Campus core.
Make effective use all available resources
The design follows the use of available resources (environmental efficiency), for 2 reasons: first, to supply renewable energy from its own installations; second, to add a singular sense to these resources, becoming a curricular material for study and research.
The global concept of “Educational&Sustainable” Campus maximizes the impact of the physical environment on learning and researching, designing the connections between Architecture and Nature as “lessons”; built spaces go beyond being a mere context, becoming “three dimensional textbooks”.

Allow for flexibility and adaptability of changing needs
The geometrical layout uses orthogonal grids which facilitate potential changes in the evolution.
The Campus incorporates 8 innovative classroom models (arrangements of users and furniture). These rectangular “boxes” permit flexible distributions and variations, which can be adapted to the needs and changes of the educational&research activities.
The variety of learning models and their spatial “dresses” follow the idea of “unity in diversity” that should become a virtue in every learning center.
Principles about Learning

A.-Learning from the sun.

The Sun Space evokes cloisters and quads. It has a solar energy R&D garden, and a sundial (human gnomon). The stability of the square shape is a metaphor of the stillness of the quad, when receiving solar rays.

B.-Learning from the water.

The Water Space and triangle shape as symbols of unsteadiness and movement, evoking hydraulic energy, and providing bioclimatic conditions (air refreshed when circulating over the water layer).

C.-Learning from the wind.

The Wind Space and circular shape as symbols of change, dynamism and the mobility of users who will live temporarily in the Campus.

What exemplary ideas do the designs contain that enhance learning?

Educational&Sustainable Campus in Madrid

1.-Idea of an Educational Campus: the project is designed under principles of social interaction, commitment to Nature and human scale.

2.-Architecture, Nature and Energy (renewable) are conceived as themes capable of transmitting values to the student&research community and to the social context.

3.-Traditional typologies (cloister, quad) in the design, as to create a modern 21st century architectural complex, inspired in heritage.

4.-“Unity in diversity”: variation and flexibility of lecture&research units, where innovative pedagogical patterns can be implemented.

5.-Campus 100% pedestrian. Vehicles are relegated to the perimeter of the site. Architecture works as a “volume protection” to preserve a delicate internal core.

6.-Idea of a Sustainable Campus. The design main goal is to create an environment that projects internal and externally the mission of the company: sustainability and renewable energies.

7.-The users of the Campus will live in it temporarily, developing activities such as study, research and physical formation.

8.-The Campus is used by employees to study, research and receive corporative formation. But it also fosters human interaction, creation of sense of “place”; somewhere they will like to come back again…

9.-The Campus will have renewable energy supply from its own facilities: solar, hydraulic, geothermic and eolic. Those facilities will serve for technological research by resident students.

10.-The Campus has 3 areas: Sun Space, Water Space and Wind Space; each one hosts a specific functional program, and is related to the 3 renewable energies.

What innovations in the planning, programming and design process supported the realization of those exemplary ideas?

1.-The Campus has been planned globally to promote a social, urban and economic transformation of the undeveloped context.

2.-As the context is mainly rustic, the Campus will act initially as an “oasis of sustainability”, projecting itself to the surrounding areas (town of San Agustín de Guadalix) as a symbol of progress. But immediately, the presence of the Campus will generate a metamorphosis of the territory.

3.-The Campus will expand progressively in the following years, provoking that related business and residential areas can emerge, together with a cultural and economical improvement. The site is currently occupied by odd buildings, which will be demolished. But some elements (pieces of Museum of Energy) will be recycled for the new Campus.

4.-The urban&architectural design goes beyond giving a mere solution to the functional program. The different spaces and buildings are capable of transmitting cultural values: ecology, renewable energies, bioclimatic solutions (all the buildings roofs present 3 types of solutions: ecological, green and water layer), recovery of heritage as an architectural inspiration source, and, overall, personal interaction as the key issue to foster human progress.

5.-Research&Education in/from Nature. The Campus design remarks the indoor-outdoor connections: open air classrooms reinforce the idea of learning “in” and “from” Nature. The 3 terraces are divided by 2 leisure&viewpoint pavilions (causal eating areas), where to stay relaxed. Trees and vegetation are indigenous species, as to be 100% sustainable.