Torre Negra by Jonathan Corral Arquitectos is a compact laboratory building at the UAD Alamedas Campus in Durango, Mexico. Organized as a dense vertical stack for health sciences education, the project uses a black metal envelope, suspended circulation, and a planted forecourt to mediate between technical program, campus life, and the local climate.
Torre Negra Technical Information
- ArchitectsJonathan Corral Arquitectos
- LocationDurango, Mexico
- Gross Area1,094.40 m2 | 11,779 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2024 – 2025
- Photographs© Recording Architecture, Paco Alvarez
The building operates through an active envelope, where architecture is expressed through modulation, repetition, and subtle variation.
– Jonathan Corral Arquitectos
Campus Insertion and Urban Presence
Torre Negra occupies a corner condition within the Alamedas Campus in Durango, where it negotiates two scales of reception. Internally, it belongs to an academic precinct organized by pavilions, parking areas, service routes, and pedestrian movement. Externally, its dark, compact mass addresses the surrounding urban fabric with a legible but controlled presence.
The building is nearly cubic in proportion and deliberately restrained in its formal language. Against the lighter and lower neighboring structures, the black volume reads as an autonomous object, yet its effect depends less on sculptural excess than on the discipline of its envelope. The facade suppresses immediate legibility, delaying the reading of floor levels, windows, and internal activity behind a continuous layer of metal fins.
At ground level, the approach is moderated by a linear landscape of rosemary, lavender, gravel beds, and water elements. This planted threshold introduces texture, scent, reflection, and sound before the encounter with the dense black facade. Rather than treating landscape as decoration, the forecourt slows the transition from campus exterior to laboratory interior, setting up a contrast between sensory softness and architectural compression.
Active Envelope and Climatic Mediation
The main facade is built from vertical black metal fins that act as both environmental moderator and visual instrument. Their primary function is climatic: they reduce direct solar exposure, filter daylight, and maintain a degree of porosity for ventilation. In a laboratory building, where controlled interiors often lead to sealed envelopes, the screen introduces an intermediate layer that tempers the exterior without erasing it.
The most distinctive condition occurs where the fins rotate through their mid-height, forming a controlled distortion across the facade. From a frontal view, the building can appear almost closed, while oblique light reveals a shifting pattern of highlights, shadows, and partial openings. This produces a visual vibration similar to a moire effect, not as graphic ornament but as a consequence of repeated elements undergoing measured variation.
The screen extends above the roofline, creating an open crown that weakens the apparent solidity of the cube. Seen from above, the roof becomes a field of parallel metal blades rather than a simple cap. This detail is significant because it shifts the reading of the building from a sealed black monolith to a layered environmental device, where thickness, shadow, ventilation, and perception are treated as architectural matter.
Programmatic Stack and Laboratory Typologies
The building accommodates a broad range of health sciences programs within a compact footprint. The ground floor functions as a rehabilitation clinic, including therapeutic pools, treatment areas, sensory rooms, consultation spaces, and support services. Above it, the program becomes increasingly specialized, with teaching kitchens, biochemistry and microbiology laboratories, digital library spaces, simulation rooms, and surgical training facilities.
This vertical organization allows technical programs with different environmental and service requirements to coexist in a concentrated volume. The floor plans suggest a pragmatic stacking strategy, where repetitive laboratory layouts are combined with more specific interiors such as the operating room, sterilization areas, recovery room, and rehabilitation pools. Circulation and service zones become critical to the building’s performance, since academic, clinical, and technical uses must operate without spatial confusion.
The nutrition laboratory illustrates the architectural handling of these interiors. Stainless steel island worktables, integrated cooktops, sinks, stools, extraction hoods, and exposed ceiling systems create a clear pedagogical setting. The glazed perimeter brings the campus into view, but the metal screen modifies daylight and reduces visual exposure, allowing the laboratory to remain connected to its surroundings without losing the focused atmosphere required for instruction.
Circulation, Thresholds, and Inhabitable Facades
Vertical circulation is treated as a spatial episode rather than a hidden technical necessity. Suspended black steel staircases are attached to the main volume, creating semi-exposed routes that connect interior and exterior conditions. Their position gives circulation a public and climatic role, allowing movement through the building to register light, air, shadow, and proximity to the campus landscape.
The secondary facades continue the filtering logic through slender metal slats. From a distance, these surfaces retain the apparent density of the black volume, yet their permeability supports cross ventilation and visual continuity. The result is an ambiguous facade system, one that alternates between mass and lightness depending on the viewer’s position and the intensity of interior illumination.
The gap between the outer screen and the glazed line becomes one of the building’s most instructive architectural zones. Catwalks, shadows, and the close rhythm of the metal blades transform the facade into an inhabitable thickness. In this narrow space, the envelope is no longer a single boundary but a sequence of layers, producing a productive tension between protection and exposure, technical performance and spatial experience.
About Jonathan Corral Arquitectos
Jonathan Corral Arquitectos is an architecture studio based in Durango, Mexico. In Torre Negra, the practice develops a compact and restrained architectural approach, using modulation, repetition, climatic filtering, and subtle variation to integrate a laboratory building into the academic and urban context of the UAD Alamedas Campus.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Jesus Gonzalez Flores
- Client: Universidad Autónoma de Durango (UAD), Alamedas Campus
- Construction company: Forum Constructora
- Other contributors: Recording Architecture and Paco Alvarez, photography
