Gerona jewel - administrative building, University of Gerona, Spain - Interior Design

Architectural Review, The, April, 1995 by Penny McGuire

This sympathetic intervention respects the existing while injecting new functions using modern materials with unself conscious flair.

The city of Gerona, in the possession of the Moors from the ninth to the eleventh century, is between Barcelona and Spain's border with France. Its ambivalent situation made it constantly subject to attack from various quarters in more unsettled times and explains its history of successive sieges, largely withstood by its embattled inhabitants. Such a history suggests an atavistic attachment to the place. The city is a provincial capital and, in more recent settled times, has become a growing industrial centre. Its historic core is spread over the eastern slope of the Onyar river and around a fine Gothic cathedral.

South of the cathedral and set into the grain of the old city, is a complex of buildings surrounding a courtyard and known as Les Aligues. The complex faces the Plaza de Sant Domenec, which takes its name from that of the convent nearby; while to the rear are the remains of a Roman wall of cyclopean construction.

Once the civic heart of Gerona and its cultural emblem, Les Aligues was used throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to house the city's university and, subsequently abandoned, fell into ruin. Only the main elevation on the Plaza de Sant Domenec, a north wing and part of an old chapel survived. Here, around the old courtyard, the Gerona practice of Josep Fuses and Joan Maria Viader has restored the fragments of the sixteenth century and stitched it to new insertions to create administrative headquarters for the modern University of Gerona.

While deploying a Modernist idiom in the design of new building on the Les Aligues site, Fuses and Viader evince regional sensibilities which have been honed over the years by various schemes in and around Gerona. Viader himself was town architect from 1983-85, and public works have included a plan for the restoration and renewal of the historic core of the city (1980-83), the restoration of 83 medieval houses overhanging the Onyar river (1982-84), and renewal of the central market (1987-93). Their scheme for Les Aligues expresses recognition of its importance as a key piece of Gerona's urban and cultural history. This apart, there is the knowledge that such buildings are vital in any process of urban renewal; for being diverse in nature, they generate diversity and above all, human activity. Recognition of the Les Aligues role is apparent in a scheme that first of all gives what was once a private enclosed courtyard the nature of a public space. Through the great open arch of the main entrance on the west it is related to the Plaza, and by means of a stepped ramp on the opposite east side it is connected to the gardens being planned for the area outside that runs up to the Roman wall. A route from one side to another and so through the confines of education and culture is implied. Throughout the building, the architects' manipulation of volume and scale, use of light and austere use of a few materials convey appreciation of those manifestations of history that exist on all sides.

Changes in levels across the site in both directions, as well as the wish to retain existing walls and arches, suggested treating different parts of the complex as discrete elements linked by stairways, and these in turn constitute rites of passage as you move from one building to another. Architecturally, the strategy was to make the new structures distinguishable from the old, 'without the difference being excessively obvious'.

The most important administrative offices occupy the existing and renovated L-shaped building formed by the main entrance and north wings. Along the southern side, a new library building closes off the courtyard and links the main facade with the old chapel on the east. This rectangular structure contains library accommodation on two levels under a flattened vault, and this is flanked down the south side by a corridor arched high overhead and flooded with light from a clerestory. The chapel has been transformed into a secular centre for students, the building truncated and made cubic by removal of the gables. It has been sealed by a stepped concrete roof, with natural light again being drawn in through clerestory windows, shed over a vaulted soffit and down into the building. An attic level clad in rough sawn pine provides students with extra space.

Apart from the honey-coloured stone of the old buildings, materials are few: fair-faced concrete, wood, stainless steel and welded and varnished steel sheeting. In places, chromatic panels have been fixed decoratively over stone or plastered walls.