THE GATE OF CREATION(Centro Roberto Garza Sada (CRGS))

Housing studios and teaching rooms for over 300 students, the Centro Roberto Garza Sada de Arte
Arquitectura y Diseo was designed by Tadao Ando as a six- storey concrete block with a huge
triangular void at its centre.This void exposes the underside of the building, creating the appearance
of a twisted structure, and creates a large sheltered entrance for staff, students and visitors below.

Additional openings elsewhere around the building provide outdoor corridors and meeting areas, as
well as an open-air amphitheatre.
The six storeys of the building accommodate different creative disciplines. Digital facilities occupy
the first two floors, while visual arts can be found on the second floor. Textiles and photography
share the third floor, model-making workshops are grouped together on the fourth floor and the top
storey is home to the fashion department.
The building has a modulation of supports (columns) arranged in a grid of 9 metres per side, having 3
modules in the short side and 11 in the long one.
The structural concept is based on the principle of composite action, that is, elements of structural
steel-lined concrete and united so that both receive and transmit efforts jointly (the concrete is not
only architectural but structural).
The finishes of the building are: Granite floors or concrete polishing, epoxy-coated Apparent
concrete walls, plaster, drywall or resin panel Ceiling drywall or prefabricated resin pane
All classrooms, offices, workshops and studio spaces are lined up along two single-loaded corridors
on each side of the elaborate exterior space slicing through the centre of the building. Organised in
the two side-bands, the rooms sometimes feel like spatial buffers to negotiate the pushing and
pulling of the exterior building shell; as a consequence, both the furniture and the rooms periodically
end up having peculiar geometries such as triangular classrooms in which each row of benches
shrinks in length until only a lecturers desk can fit.
The teachers lounge is particularly bizarre as this already very narrow space has to squeeze in
between the leaning wall of the buildings striated underbody and beneath the bulky mass of one of
the amphitheatres. Because all spaces big and small have to fit into the dimension of the side
bands, the biggest studio space for the thesis students becomes very long and cuts through three
levels of the five-level building; this makes the space impractical for both studio activities and
lectures.
Two amphitheatres are embedded in the huge structure
It is apparent that in this building in Monterrey, two ideologies of architectural design have to
negotiate their differences: on the one hand, you can feel Andos masterly insistence on tectonic
precision and consistency; but on the other, it is also clear that this building was sculpted with
modelling software, where Boolean operations have sometimes produced formal complexities that
were hardly compatible with the physical laws of construction at least those that want to look
minimalist, elegant and effortless.
The whole structure including the plans and the parametric form of entrance is designed on grids.