A Campus for the 21st Century: The Purisima Alameda District of Monterrey

This option studio will examine the role of the academic institution as a driver of an intermediate scale urban project. The studio will focus on how the campus, conceived as an open canvas for architectural and urban experimentation, can serve as a generator of new spatial relationships between institution and city within the Purisima Alameda District in downtown Monterrey (Mexico).

For 2016, the Universidad Regiomontana (U-ERRE) has agreed to construct the first gateless university in Mexico. With the implementation of a new institutional model, the campus must reframe the relationship between the spaces of the academy, the neighborhood, and the city at large. A fresh institutional perspective, paired with significant investment in the university’s campus, has an enormous potential to completely rethink the Purisima Alameda District and in doing so transform it into a new university city model for Monterrey and beyond.

Taking this new institutional development initiative as a point of departure, the studio will explore the agency of architecture and design in shaping a new campus—all in an effort to construct new spatial formats that can help us rethink the space of the experimental campus for the 21st Century University.