Forum: The Transformative Unit
Client // Universidad Regiomontana • Location // Monterrey, Mexico • Program // Campus • Status // Proposal / 2015 • Area // 64,000m2 • Team // Clayton Strange
Forum: The Transformative Unit envisions a new centrality through the design of the university as a complementary urban strategy alongside the existing grid of the Purisima Alameda district. The university takes on the form of a nodal, dispersed arrangement, maximizing the territory affected by its development while concentrating urban life at each of the nodes through increased density and the synergy achieved through the hybridization of program and use.
The project appears both as the inevitable outcome of an organizational system of the city and as the deliberate result of place making. A series of high-density nodes are deployed throughout the district, operating both as special moments and as a systemic property of the urban fabric; at once iconic and inevitable. Reinterpreting the existing urban block and parcel structure by introducing novel forms and organizations, conditions new and altogether unexpected emerge through their combination. Furthermore, since the resulting nodes are iconic and predictable, the new network becomes a visual datum for the district, allowing both the casual city dweller and the university student to map their position in the fabric.
The form and programming of each node serve to further engage the idea that the university is an inextricable component of the urban fabric. Each consists of a university ring, residential towers that sit on this new landscape plinth, and courtyard buildings that engage the dominant typological qualities of the existing fabric. Within these forms are to be found a mixture of residential, academic, retail, office, and cultural programs in which distinctions between academic life and broader publics are blurred into a complex, overlapping palimpsest.
