Juan García Correa, John González and Claudia Rueda Sink a Circular Amphitheater into a Manizales Engineering Building

Engineering faculties usually end up in the most forgettable buildings on campus: long slabs of labs, a corridor, a stair at each end. The S1 Building at the National University of Colombia's La Nubia campus in Manizales starts from the same practical brief. It consolidates the laboratories and offices of Electrical and Electronics Engineering into 4,122 m², completed in 2019. Architects Juan García Correa, John González and Claudia Rueda then gave it a second job. Following the La Nubia Campus Master Plan, the building also had to fix how people move across a steep, fragmented campus.

That second objective is the reason to look closely. The architects did not treat circulation as a corridor running through the building. They turned it into the building's public face: a sunken circular court, grass wedges radiating from it, and concrete ramps that curl down the slope and pass over the rooms below. We read S1 as a piece of campus infrastructure that happens to hold laboratories, and that reversal of priorities makes it worth your attention.

A Building You Walk Across Before You Enter

From the air, the project barely reads as a building. You see triangular lawns, a ring of concrete paths, a curved yellow-tiled ramp and a round court at the center, with the teal metal roofs of older campus blocks lined up nearby. The mass of the program sits beneath and behind this ground plane, so the dominant gesture is landscape rather than volume.

This is a smart reading of the Manizales terrain. The city is built on ridges, and level ground is scarce and expensive to make. Instead of flattening a platform and placing an object on it, the team let the floors step down the slope and used the resulting terraces as walkable roofs. The roof plan drawings confirm the strategy: faceted triangular planes fan around the central void like a folded sheet.

The Sunken Circle as Campus Living Room

The circular court is the anchor of the scheme. Tiered steps, a yellow tile floor and planted beds make it an amphitheater, though it works just as well as an informal place to sit between classes. Seen from inside, the curved concrete balconies of the floors above wrap the space and give it an enclosed, almost civic character.

A round void in a sloping site does something useful: it gives every level a common reference point. Whether you arrive from the upper ramps or the lower entrances, the court tells you where you are. For a building whose brief is partly about wayfinding, a single legible center is a better answer than signage.

Ramps That Do the Work of a Master Plan

The ramps carry most of the project's ambition. They sweep across the slope, cantilever past round columns and land on gravel beds and lawns, linking campus levels that a conventional stair would have connected far more abruptly. The underside of one ramp, balanced on a single round column with a concrete tower behind, is the most structurally expressive moment in the photographs.

We think the choice of ramps over stairs is the right one, and not only for accessibility. A ramp turns a change in level into a route you can linger on, with views opening and closing as you turn. It also makes the building permeable: you can cross it at several heights without entering a lobby or passing a reception desk.

Concrete Balconies and a Single Splash of Orange

Facing the court, the floors stack as curved concrete slabs with glass guardrails, so the edges read as continuous horizontal lines rather than a wall with windows. A red pipe running along a soffit shows up early as a recurring motif: the building services are left visible rather than hidden.

Away from the circle, the language changes. A two-storey block wears corrugated orange metal panels with an exterior concrete stair against it. It is a blunter, more industrial moment, and it suits the engineering program. The contrast between curved concrete toward the public court and cladding on the working edges is a sensible way to sort public faces from back-of-house ones.

Services on Display

Inside, the ceilings stay raw. Exposed concrete beams, red sprinkler pipes, cable trays and suspended linear lights are all left in view above lounges and workbenches. Round pendant lamps and blue and orange seating soften the shared areas without trying to disguise the structure.

For an Electrical and Electronics Engineering faculty, this candor reads almost as curriculum. Students can trace where power and data run, and the faculty can change cabling without tearing down ceilings. Exposed services can easily look unfinished, but here they are arranged with enough order to read as intentional.

Offices Built for Shared Work

The office floors are mostly open: rows of white desks, partitioned clusters on grey plank flooring, and meeting tables tucked under the beams. Tall windows bring daylight deep into the plan, and the photographs show people working, walking and meeting rather than staged empty rooms.

Consolidating a department that was previously dispersed is partly an organizational project, and the open layout supports that. It shortens the distance between colleagues. The trade-off is acoustic privacy, which open engineering offices rarely solve well, and we would want to hear from occupants about how these floors perform during a busy semester.

Labs and Lecture Halls on Stepped Floors

The teaching spaces follow the logic of the site. Computer classrooms sit on stepped floors with yellow-fronted desks under exposed ducts, and the tiered lecture halls, with orange and black seating and timber floors, use the slope instead of building raked platforms on flat ground.

The fan-shaped auditorium visible on the plans shows the same idea at a larger scale. Section and program line up: the terrain that shapes the outdoor amphitheater also shapes the indoor one. It is a tidy piece of design economy, and it explains why the building feels coherent even though its pieces are very different in character.

Rooms That Borrow the Mountains

The smaller rooms make the most of the view. A meeting room's glass wall looks straight onto green mountains and cloud, a lounge corner sits against full-height glazing, and a private office pairs a board-marked concrete wall with a window onto a stepped concrete light well.

That light well is a quiet detail worth noticing. In a building pushed into a hillside, the risk is dark rear rooms. Carving wells and terraces into the section brings daylight and outlook to spaces that would otherwise sit against earth. A bioclimatic consultant, Gerson Duplat, was on the team, and moves like this suggest passive light and air were treated seriously, even if the specific strategies are not documented in what we could review.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings make the section the real protagonist. The elevations show long exterior ramps, a tall circulation tower and an elevated bridge, while the sections show floors stepping down the slope on piles, with a vertical shaft tying the levels together. A structural detail of a triangular steel frame built from IPE-360 beams explains how the faceted roof planes are carried.

The plans repeat one organizing figure at every level: a central circular hall with rooms radiating from it and a curved walkway along one edge. On the lowest level, the fan-shaped auditorium with raked seating sits beside the circle. The geometry is disciplined, and it scales cleanly from roof to foundation.

Why This Project Matters

Most university buildings are briefed as containers for a department. S1 was briefed as a container and a connector, and the architects let the connector shape the whole building. The result is a faculty building whose most-used space is probably the one with no door: the sunken court and the ramps that knit La Nubia's levels together. That is a model other hillside campuses in the Andes, and elsewhere, could learn from.

It also shows that an engineering building can be generous without being expensive or decorative. Concrete, metal cladding, exposed services and a strong sectional idea do most of the work. Where the project could be stronger is in how the different exterior languages meet, since the orange-clad block feels less resolved than the circular court. Still, as a demonstration that circulation can be architecture rather than leftover space, S1 makes its case convincingly.

S1 Building, National University of Colombia, by Juan García Correa, John González and Claudia Rueda. Location: La Nubia Campus, Manizales, Colombia. Area: 4,122 m². Year: 2019. Photography: Carlos Amador.

About the Studio

John González

Claudia Rueda

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