SUSTAINABILITY
class, made up of immigrants from neighbouring countries, in an urban fabric consolidated through the residential typology of one and two floors, with a regular to precarious construction level. The building responds to a need for health services in a vast pericentral sector with precarious infrastructure. The project is based on a very simple idea: a ‘mono-material box’ of exposed brick masonry, which surrounds an independent reinforced concrete structure under which all the spaces necessary for the required medical practices are distributed.4 In response to the horizontality of the neighbourhood, a single-story building is proposed, with a double-height front in the public sector that provides hierarchy, with the lower part being the actual hospital area behind. It is installed on a site with a flat topography with its main access facing north. The plot is large in relation to the proposed program, which allowed for the creation of a restricted circulation street that surrounds the building and separates it from the neighbourhood’s residences, highlighting it from the surroundings. In this same sense, and to reinforce the institutional character, the building is set back from the front, generating a large public space of neighbourhood scale that in turn gives hierarchy to the main facade and allows a complete view of the Hospital when you arrive.
North façade of the hospital. The use of brick in this work combines
practical aspects, such as its low maintenance in the field of public buildings, along with ongoing research into the material. This approach is part of an exhaustive search that we have been carrying out in our professional practice, which includes both university teaching, with practical exercises carried out by students and teachers to manipulate, weigh, glue and lock bricks, and the creation of an image bank based on experiences from previous works that configure the learning of a wide range of constructive possibilities of brick. In this building, the façade is presented
as a large screening of brick ‘modified in scale’ that, located towards the north,
functions as a sunshade composed of three horizontal bands that protect from the sun of that orientation, while the sun from the West is stopped by vertical ribs at a certain distance. The thickness of the parasol is not random either, but comes from a decision studied through analysis of the sunlight of a sun that descends almost vertically at 82° in summer, and that tilts in winter. This study was drawn up in the design stage and then verified in the built reality, where the parasol effectively protects against sunlight in the summer, but allows it to enter the building in the winter, generating an atmosphere bathed in natural light, desirable within healthcare architecture. It is about reinventing this ancestral
material with which we count with ease, and finding possibilities and answers for a contemporary architecture beyond its usual uses. I consider that this search is not only ours, of course, but also that of great Latin American architects such as Solano Benítez, José Cubilla, and Javier Corvalán. It is therefore a disciplinary contribution and a demystification of the fact that a building with these characteristics of high sanitary complexity necessarily needs some type of industrialised envelope, much less in our latitudes where there are excellent artisans in the brick-making tradition; artisans who in the case of Villa el Libertador were local people, who lived in the same neighbourhood as the hospital. The technology used allowed the use of local labourers, which also made the project a generator of employment and an economic engine.
Using brick as the main material not
only connects the complex with the architectural tradition of Cordoba and its people, but also improves the thermal conditions of the interior, since this material has a very good performance in the local climate, characterised by wide thermal variations. Each façade deserved its own
Plan: North façade and section. IFHE DIGEST 2025
reflection imbued with the experiences of our architectural culture. Hence, the north façade is constituted not only as a parasol,
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©Gonzalo Viramonte
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