Gothic stained glass, rebuilt in glass and steel: Durango's UAD tower

A faceted glass facade modelled on the stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals is the centerpiece of the UAD Alamedas Tower, an 8-level educational building just completed in Durango, Mexico. Local studio Jonathan Corral Arquitectos designed the structure for the Universidad Durango Santander (UAD), a private institution with campuses across several Mexican states.

The tower sits on a site the university acquired overlooking Las Alamedas, a prominent tree-lined promenade that runs through the heart of the city. That setting shaped the whole design. As the studio put it: "The project establishes its relationship with this setting through an intermediate condition – an architecture with a clear urban presence, whose scale and materiality engage with the existing landscape."

How do you turn a cathedral window into a campus facade?

The mechanism is fairly simple once you see it. The central portion of the north-facing elevation holds a glazed elevator and a faceted curtain wall (a non-structural outer skin of glass and metal) with dark mullions and triangular panes of glass. Those triangles do the Gothic work.

"The large glazed surface of the facade draws on the compositional logic of the Gothic stained-glass window, translating it into a contemporary urban scale," the team said. In other words, the architects borrowed the geometry — the way small shaped panes assemble into a larger figure — and dropped the coloured glass and religious iconography.

The rest of the exterior reads as several buildings rather than one. Along the main elevation:

• One portion is clad in grey fibre-cement panels.
• Another is lined with a black metal screen.
• The rear wall is more opaque, with grey cladding and short horizontal windows.

The building is triangular in plan and totals 7,987 square metres across eight levels plus a basement. The program is broad: classrooms, studios, meeting rooms, offices, a cafeteria, and a courtroom for mock trials. That last space makes sense given what UAD teaches — law, architecture, medicine, sciences, communication technologies and gastronomy.

What does the Gothic reference change for the interior?

Quite a lot, actually. The transparency that begins at the facade continues through the building. A broad stone staircase fronting the main entrance doubles as a public plaza, and the building sits elevated above grade to guard against potential flooding.

Inside, visitors enter a full-height atrium ringed by walkways with frosted glass railings. The atrium is designed to create "visual continuity" between interior spaces and the adjacent promenade. "From within, the urban landscape is framed by different levels and circulation routes, keeping the context a constant presence throughout the building experience," the team said.

The lobby holds a sunken plaza wrapped in black marble and a suspended staircase that functions as a sculptural element. Elsewhere, the architects left structural elements exposed rather than hiding them behind finishes. The basement, which contains digital research and consultation space, has bare concrete walls and flooring.

The top level holds three auditoriums under a pine-lattice ceiling intended, in the studio's words, to be "in dialogue with exposed structures and ducts, as well as steel railings." The reasoning behind the exposed-structure approach is explicit: "Rather than concealing the logic of construction, the solution allows structure and program to share a common architectural expression," the team said.

A rooftop terrace caps the building, giving students and staff a gathering point with views over the city.

Context and credits

The tower joins a small run of distinctive Mexican campus architecture. Previous university projects in the country include a business school in Aguascalientes by a team of architects, organized around courtyards and lush gardens, and a Tatiana Bilbao-designed biotechnology building in Mexico City composed of irregularly stacked glass boxes.

Project credits list Jonathan Corral Contreras as design architect, with a design team of Heriberto Díaz Ortega, Aida Uribe, Sergio Cisneros, Osvaldo Medina and Julio Rodriguez. Forum Constructura — Martin Soriano Villanueva and Fernando Soriano Villanueva — served as contractor, and Jesús González Flores handled structural engineering.

The UAD Alamedas Tower suggests one way Gothic references survive in contemporary architecture: not as ornament, but as a geometric system for glass that keeps a campus building visually connected to the promenade below.