2017-2018
Design: Cristina López Uribe and Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez
Av. Universidad 3000, Ciudad Universitaria
Team: Hugo Hernández Quezada, Zenia Lozano Medécigo, Alberto Gisholt Tayabas, Sebastián Michel Mejía Ramírez, Isaías González Maldonado, Erick Adrián Amaro Ortega.
The Jaime García Terrés bookstore building is located on the northern edge of the UNAM University City (Ciudad Universitaria). It was originally built to house the University Press, which currently occupies most of the original building. In the 1990s, four of its bays—on the north side—were converted into a bookstore.
According to photographs from 1947 and 1948, this was the only access point to the University City campus during its construction. This likely explains why the official address of the complex is Avenida Universidad 3000, rather than its access point on Avenida de los Insurgentes, which has much greater urban significance.
The zoning plan published for the inscription of the University City campus on the UNESCO World Heritage List establishes that the building to be rehabilitated is located in the buffer zone. In all the documents from 1954—the year in which most of the campus buildings were occupied—it is clear that the building had not yet been constructed, but in photographs from 1957, it can be seen completely finished. For this reason, we consider it a fundamental design criterion for the rehabilitation that, even though the building falls outside the official timeframe of the original CU buildings, its architecture and landscape have practically the same historical value as those of the buildings in the Core Zone.
Throughout the entire process of conceptualizing and designing the bookstore, the architectural characteristics of the building that houses it were taken into account, as well as the spatial, formal, landscape and public space qualities of the group of buildings included in the Core Zone of the Campus in terms of their original design.
In the project, administrative and service activities are concentrated on the east side of the building, where most of the original partition walls were preserved. The large, double-height space on the east side was maintained to house the majority of the book display. The original building was encircled by a "belt" composed of two slender steel and glass pavilions that echo the architectural language of the original CU (Ciudad Universitaria) architecture. The main entrance to the bookstore is located at the junction of these two pavilions. The slender, transparent steel structures aim to bring the historic building into the present, opening it up to the surrounding landscape through strategies of openness and integration of public and private space, similar to those found in the original CU buildings.
Within the pavilions, new ways of experiencing, using, and reading university publications are proposed. These will be visible from the outside and will invite pedestrians and motorists to enter the bookstore. All the trees in the surrounding square have been respected in the project, and their conservation, as well as the consolidation of the natural space as a public space, has been a determining factor in the entire design process.
