In 2011, Angelini Group decided to donate the necessary funds to create a center where companies, businesses and more in general, demand, could converge with researchers and state of the art university knowledge creation. The aim was to contribute to the process of transferring know-how, identifying business opportunities, adding value to existing resources or registering patents in order to improve the country’s competitiveness and consequently its development. The Universidad Católica de Chile would host such a center and allocated a site in its San Joaquin Campus.
Our proposal to accommodate such goals was to design a building in which
at least 4 forms of work could be verified: a matrix of formal and
informal work crossed by individual and collective ways of encountering
people. In addition to that, we thought that face to face contact is
unbeatable when one wants to create knowledge, so we multiplied
throughout the building the places where people could meet: from the
elevator’s lobby with a bench where to sit if you happen to run into
somebody that has interesting information to share, to a transparent
atrium where you can sneak into what others are doing while circulating
vertically, to elevated squares throughout the entire height of the
building.
The reversal of the typical office space floor plan (replacing the
opaque core with transparent curtain wall glass perimeter by an open
core with the mass strategically opened in the perimeter) responded not
only to functional reasons but to the environmental performance and
character of the building as well.
