Internat Bella Vista
The Design and Building Construction | CODE department of Prof. Ralf Pasel at the Institute of Architecture at TU Berlin has been dedicated to a non-profit project for the Andean village of Bella Vista in Bolivia since 2013. In an international cooperation with the organisation Fundación Cristo Vive Bolivia, which is dedicated to fighting poverty in Latin America, students under the supervision of the department are successively designing, planning and implementing the buildings for an agronomy campus consisting of an agricultural school and a boarding school with local partners on site. The cooperation aims not only to spatially expand the Instituto Tecnológico Sayarinapaj vocational school for agriculture founded by the NGO, but rather to develop an integral, long-term concept for a training centre as a showcase project. The agronomy campus, where young people are offered a professional perspective in the countryside, will be developed into an innovation centre in the field of integral vocational training, water and waste management and ecological agriculture.
In the first construction phase, the building of the agricultural school was constructed, which ostensibly touches on aspects of sustainable, climate-friendly construction. In the next construction phase, the boarding school building was planned and built in order to give disadvantaged young people from remote villages in Cochabamba access to an education at the agricultural school. It was to enable them to remain at the training site during the week and at the same time take over the running of the agronomy campus on their own responsibility.
Images and Plans
Technical Description
Beyond the use of regional resources, a building is also appropriate in its constructive intelligence. Are the solutions climate-friendly, are there demographic and/or cultural considerations? What are the appropriate room sequences and room sizes for a project in poor Bella Vista and how do the ideas of the local population relate to the ideas of the German team? In the form of catalogues and already since 2013 for the construction of the agricultural school, these aspects were examined by the students and discussed with specialists, expert planners and local actors. In the conviction that ultimately a successful work is characterised in particular by its appropriateness for the place and for the people.