Article source: CODE 

The Bella Vista boarding school was planed and built during the second building phase of the Agronomy Campus near Cochabamba, Bolivia. The vocational center provides a perspective to juveniles from extremely poor families in Bolivia that goes beyond the common subsistence level of agriculture. CODE and Prof. Ralf Pasel at TU Berlin’s department for Design and Building Construction is dedicated to an interdisciplinary, long-term project in the Andean village Bella Vista, Bolivia, aiming to develop local solutions against poverty as well as finding solutions to global issues such as increasing urbanization and rural depopulation. In an international cooperation with Fundación Cristo Vive Bolivia (a non-profit organization dedicated to the fight poverty in Latin America) and other local stakeholders, CODE designed, planned and constructed the boarding house with TU Berlin students in a collaborative process that began with the construction of the agriculture school in 2013-15 and that now was completed with the new boarding school. The newly build boarding school constitutes the programmatic extension of the agricultural zone and sets up a broadly and large-scale agronomy campus. Consequently, the new building complements the existing agricultural school in its functions with i.e. a dormitory for the pupils, a room for the lecturer, a kitchen, a multipurpose room for dining and study as well as several individual bathrooms. The architecture of the boarding house allows spaces for encounter and rest. The two enclosed private patios form an extension of the surrounding qualitative outdoor living spaces on the Campus.

Image Courtesy © Cristóbal Palma

• Architects: CODE
• Project: Boarding School Bolivia
• Location: Cochabamba, Bolivia
• Photography: Cristóbal Palma
• Client: Fundación Cristo Vive Bolivia
• Team: Ralf Pasel, Andreas Skambas, Lorena Valdivia, Anna Wortmann, Max Hacke with Students of TU Berlin
• Date: 2015-18

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