Putting the university's function into an urban context: Urbanism and architecture in the City of Córdoba (Argentina)

Abstract

This paper begins with a synthetic historical précis of the City of Córdoba (Argentina) laying emphasis on its origens as a university city as from the founding of El Colegio Máximo in 1608. Town-and-gown interplay and the way that this has adapted itself throughout the city's history is shown as going through various transformations in step with the changing role of the university and the way that this has been understood by the citizens. It would be difficult to understand the city were its academic background to be forgotten. The project put forward by three authors of this paper before the Faculty of Architecture And Urbanism of the National University of Cordoba is based on an academic community-productive community connection that would call for a spacial re-organization of the university's function that would lead to its complete intergration within the city's urban being and in which the river, far from remaining a limiting boundry, would become a structuring axis of the place. The proposition imaginatively calls for preservation, renovation, rehabilitation and re-cycling policies and at all times underlines the important part that urban design must play as the key factor in such a process