Inside Peru's modern-day Machu Picchu is this the best new building in the world?
Inside Peru's modern-day Machu Picchu – is this the best new building in the world?
The soaring buttresses and hanging walkways of UTEC in Lima have earned it the RIBA international prize. And Grafton Architects, the Irish team behind it, have equally big plans for Britain
Oliver Wainwright
Sunday 15 January 2017 10.00 EST
Listening to Irish architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara speaking about their work, you could be forgiven for thinking they were describing a dramatic mountain range, or the rocky coasts of County Clare. They talk of cliff faces, summits and ravines, of spaces being carved and cleft to form grottos, overhangs and terraces. When you encounter their buildings, it becomes apparent why: they feel like structures that have been wrestled into shape with geological force.
The result of their latest tectonic rupture was recently crowned “best new building in the world”, having been awarded the inaugural RIBA international prize in December. This was a suitably momentous accolade for a vast concrete monolith that doesn’t pull its punches. Perched dramatically on the edge of a ravine that rises above a motorway in Peru, the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC) is a symphony of soaring buttresses and daring cantilevers, an apt home for Lima’s new university of engineering, where students will learn the art of mining minerals from the Earth’s crust.
“We’re interested in weight,” says McNamara, 64, who founded Grafton Architects with Farrell, 65, as a co-operative in 1978. “For us, the enjoyment in architecture is the sense of weight being borne down or supported, the feeling of moving within the forces of gravity. It’s a very primal need.”
It’s certainly a feeling that will be impressed upon the students walking into UTEC on their first day of term. Great structural fins march along the spine of the building at 20-metre intervals, supporting a vertiginous stack of laboratories and classrooms, rising up either side of a nave-like void that runs through the centre of the complex. Looking up, you get a thrilling view of intersecting concrete beams and slabs, an aerial ballet of staggered terraces connected by flying walkways and leaping staircases. Given the amenable climate, it is all open to the elements, allowing coastal breezes to flow through the atrium, and the sounds and smells of the street to bleed into the building.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/15/grafton-architects-riba-international-prize-utec-yvonne-farrell-shelley-mcnamara-interview
