Designed by Alejandro Aravena | ELEMENTAL, In 2011, Angelini Group decided to donate the necessary funds to create a center where companies, businesses and more in general, demand, could converge with researchers and state of the art university knowledge creation. The aim was to contribute to the process of transferring know-how, identifying business opportunities, adding value to existing resources or registering patents in order to improve the country?s competitiveness and consequently its development. The Universidad Católica de Chile would host such a center and allocated a site in its San Joaquin Campus.

Our proposal to accommodate such goals was to design a building in which at least 4 forms of work could be verified: a matrix of formal and informal work crossed by individual and collective ways of encountering people. In addition to that, we thought that face to face contact is unbeatable when one wants to create knowledge, so we multiplied throughout the building the places where people could meet: from the elevator?s lobby with a bench where to sit if you happen to run into somebody that has interesting information to share, to a transparent atrium where you can sneak into what others are doing while circulating vertically, to elevated squares throughout the entire height of the building. Photography: ELEMENTAL | Nina Vidic
The reversal of the typical office space floor plan (replacing the opaque core with transparent curtain wall glass perimeter by an open cor...