There is no one who has not noticed the two rationalist towers of the School of Industrial Engineering (ETSEIB) when leaving Barcelona via Diagonal. That urban profile of the avenue will change in the coming years with the construction of a new building for the center of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), where some 4,000 students, professors, and support staff coexist. It is not that the school seeks to gain space to meet greater demand, but rather that it needs to be rehabilitated and, to do so without stopping classes, it has to move classrooms to a new building.
A complex approach that has been on the university's table for decades but that the economic crisis has stalled for too many academic years, as has happened with projects for so many other public centers in the city. The ETSEIB towers were built in the 1960s and the years weigh heavily, with problems in the building's finishes and water leaks. The rehabilitation it requires is so integral, even reconstruction is being considered, that it cannot be carried out while maintaining teaching. The proposal to build a new building began to be worked on in the 2000s, and that is why the base is already built, with a couple of floors made at that time and on top of which the future building will be erected.
"It is a much-awaited project for the university," explains the rector of the UPC, Daniel Crespo. The works are expected to begin at the end of this year, once the executive project has been refined in the coming months and all municipal permits have been obtained. The architecture firms that will carry it out are all Catalan and were chosen from among twenty proposals submitted to the competition. They will be Eduard Gascón and Elies Rull (TAC Arquitectes), Luis Alegre and Lluís Lloveres (A&LL), and TYPSA, with the collaboration of BBG and Ecopenta. Precisely, one of them, Luis Alegre, is the son of the engineer Vicente Alegre, who built the current towers together with the architect Robert Terradas.
The new building, in the shape of a cube, has been conceived to give continuity to the current structure and not detract from the prominence of the towers, as well as to improve the permeability of the campus and interaction with the environment, with the forecast of calming the road behind it, Pau Gargallo street. It will have nine floors and add 16,000 square meters. Photovoltaic panels will be included on the facade and roof so that the building generates 40% of the energy it will consume.
The ground floors will be used for classrooms while the rest will be dedicated to laboratories, with the aim of adapting to a discipline that increasingly has more practical training. The new building is expected to be finished between the end of 2027 and the beginning of 2028, with the forecast of progressively filling its interior with activity and being fully operational in the 2028/2029 academic year. Once this happens, the reform of the current facilities will remain. These works will serve to solve existing pathologies and adapt to new regulations on issues such as insulation, but, for this, there is neither a planned calendar nor committed resources.
The budget for the new building is 54 million euros, divided between 42 million for construction and 12 million for equipping the interior. Currently, the university already has 11 million euros to get everything started, with one million contributed by the Generalitat. The UPC is working with the Department of Research and the Department of Economy to finance part of the total outlay.
A portfolio of almost a hundred buildings
The different UPC campuses add up to almost a hundred properties, with some of them having exceeded 100 years. Many of them require an update, such as the ETSEIB towers, with very high energy bills due to outdated insulation or being poorly adapted to new accessibility requirements. After studying the state of each building for two years, the university will allocate a first package of 27 million euros by 2026 to begin with the improvements, but none will require a major construction like the School of Industrial Engineering. In this context, the UPC requests an increase in the Generalitat's university investment plan, which was reduced to a minimum during the economic crisis and half of its amount recovered a few years ago. Before the crisis, the allocation was 100 million euros.