Hear
It sounds like a great paradox: the facade of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) presents risk of detachments. The building where many of the country’s most prestigious architects were trained and where 30,000 students currently study has been covered by protective structures for more than a year, to guarantee the safety of the people who enter the building daily.
The metal structures were placed in March of last year, after a survey of the structure revealed material detachments in several sectors of the façade and risks in others, UBA sources detailed. Since then, in the last 15 months, the building has not been under construction, but rather waiting to obtain the financing necessary to carry out an enhancement that, according to its authorities, “is not within the reach” of the maintenance budget that the building has nor of the money for works that the institution has.
As reported by its rectorate, the work that would need to be carried out to solve the damage to the façade and guarantee the safety of passers-by costs, $5,394 millionaccording to its last update, dated December 30, 2023.
“Given the magnitude of this work, and because it was not within the reach of the building maintenance budget of our faculty, intervention was given to the General Directorate of University Constructions of UBA, which began negotiations with the national government to obtain the funds that would guarantee that comprehensive intervention,” he stated. Hernán Noriega, Secretary of Habitat of FADU.
But the management did not advance. UBA sources stated that in December of last year, shortly before the new government took office, the project to enhance the building’s value “was shelved.” “The work had already passed the last level of approval in the Ministry of Public Works, which is level five. All that was left was for the tender to be opened, but the process stopped moving forward,” they indicated. THE NATION He consulted the Ministries of Human Capital and Economy about the status of the work request, but received no answers.
Given this scenario, the UBA authorities warned that they had no idea when it could be carried out and highlighted that, in the meantime, the monthly rental of the scaffolding implies a significant expense for the FADU.
For students, teaching and non-teaching staff, the image of the building covered by iron pipes has become commonplace. “We incorporated it as part of the landscape,” says, laughing, a clothing design teacher, who is also a former student of FADU, and asked to protect her identity. She no longer notices her presence nor other defects that the building has had since at least 10 years, when she entered for the first time to take the Common Basic Cycle. Among them, it stands out that most of the windows are broken and that You cannot do classes using the internet.
“There are things that you naturalize. That you say: ‘well, from now on they are like that’. In the college you can’t open or close the windows: either they are open or they are closed, because they don’t work. 90% of the wooden table tops are detached from the tables. “I never saw a new table, the same as the benches,” she details.
What bothers him the most are the problems that affect the operation of the classes: at FADU there is Wi-Fi, but it does not always work, and its connection, teachers and students highlight, is complicated. In many areas it is also not possible to activate mobile data.
The most affected are those who teach and attend classes in the basement of the building where the UBA’s Common Basic Cycle (CBC) headquarters operates. There, as the students highlight, “there is directly no mobile data.” The problem of Internet access affects class dynamics. “We tried, in class, to see something on the internet with the teacher and it couldn’t be done,” emphasizes Agustina, a CBC student who preferred to protect her last name. In the months that she has been in classes, she has never managed to connect her cell phone to the Internet.
Internet access problems affect classes throughout the building, says a clothing design teacher who teaches classes on the upper floors: “Forget about having a class with interconnection. “Sometimes there is no signal even to call on the phone.”
From the FADU they affirm that connectivity problems are related to the massive number of users who demand it every day. “In 2022-2023, a large investment was made in Wi-Fi networks, antennas and repeaters and there is a free signal available for the FADU community throughout the building,” he says. Noriega, while admitting that “it presents some inconveniences, which are the same as those that occur in a major sporting event or a show in a stadium.” “This is a community of more than 30,000 people. And there are peak hours, where everyone enters or connects at the same time. In those moments, there is no bandwidth to reach,” he continues.
Last year the faculty renovated three of the six elevators, a work that the educational community had been demanding for years, while at the same time it began to enhance the other three. The elevators replaced were the original ones and were 53 years old. Also last year, the enhancement of some bathrooms in the building began. However, those that have not been improved continue to have closed cubicles, in addition to lacking basic hygiene products, such as soap and toilet paper.
Without a doubt, members of the educational community highlight that the most symptomatic of the FADU’s building problems is the state of its façade.. Opened in 1971 in it Pavilion 3 of Ciudad Universitaria –the project, at that time, was to move more than 80% of the UBA enrollment to this property– the FADU originally had concrete sunshades on its façade. But due to the lack of maintenance of the building, they began to suffer landslides, which is why they had to be removed. Since then, the UBA details, the façade faced new problems.
“When removing the concrete plates that functioned as sunshades, more than 30 years ago, in some areas, cracks occurred that allowed leaks, as a result of the expansion of the material exposed to continuous sunlight. That sequence of daily expansion and contraction plus the effect of water caused some small pieces of the original material to detach. This occurred mainly in specific sectors of the N (Vicente López) and E (Río de la Plata) façades, which are the most exposed to the sun. The detachments were small pieces of material that, when inspecting the building, were found on some cornice and that indicated to us the convenience of further studies and the placement of protections to carry them forward,” Noriega explained.
Not just the façade: FADU claims to not have enough money to do basic maintenance of the building. “By number of students, our faculty is the second in the UBA, after Medicine. Our building houses the population of a city and has the budget of a building. And now, on top of that, it was cut,” Noriega stated last April, when asked by this newspaper.
The crisis in the building situation of FADU currently coincides with a context of bidding for the university budget, which so far this year has already led to different conflicts and social demonstrations. At the beginning of the school year, the UBA faculties were operating with the lowest level of funding since 1997, when registration began, according to a report by the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ) based on data of the Open Budget platform. The situation was reversed in mid-May, after the institution reached an agreement with the Government and suspended the Budget Emergency declared at the beginning of April, although the demand for updating funds for salaries and other programs continued.
“The budget for the operating expenses of the UBA is enough for minor works of operation of the faculties, but for works of great magnitude, such as that of the façade of the FADU, the Government was always required,” they say from the UBA.
They also warn about the opening and closing problems that most of the windows in the building have, which in total are more than 3,000: “The [ventanas] Banners have an opening system built especially for the faculty. The original mechanism includes worm gears, articulated arms, drive cranks and original cast aluminum parts. They are not commercially manufactured and since the pandemic we have been trying to solve this historic problem but, given the number of these windows, it implies an investment that is not within our reach at this time.”
