Los Andes University New School of Music: P Building, Phase II
New building for The School of Music. Bogotá, Col. Phase II, Competition entry. 2025.
The new music building at Universidad de los Andes is built around a pause, the way a piece of music is built around its silences.
The design reads as two bodies in dialogue. Below, a solid base holds the rehearsal rooms, recording studios and performance spaces, insulated from foot traffic and turned inward toward sound. Above, a light steel volume floats free, cantilevering out over the old classroom ‘vagones’ and the plaza below, held up by little more than its own diagonal bracing. Between the two is the gap where all social activities actually happens: a full-height atrium, a piano hall, spaces to arrive, circulate, stay. The silence between the notes, made architectural.
That floating volume folds into the site's own cypress trees, threading its steel frame between trunks that have grown there for decades, and the building appears to hover just above the old roofline of the ‘Campito de San José’. Glass wraps the diagonal bracing on every side, so that from the plaza, the building's structure becomes visible and exposed, and part of the composition. Inside, faculty, students and instruments cross paths on the bridges and platforms suspended within that frame, the diagonal braces doubling as a kind of visual counterpoint to the movement below.
The old pedestrian bridge connecting the campus survives, but transformed: no longer a passage for feet alone, but an instrument of memory, carrying a new, controlled route through the building and tying it back to Bloque P1, the existing music building it complements. On the roof, a garden terrace traces the plan of the old plaza it replaces, framing views out toward the city on one side and the eastern hills on the other, so that an ensemble can play against the skyline at dusk or a choir can rehearse facing the mountains at dawn.
The Bloque P doesn't separate performance from the campus around it. It stages it.
