A New University Campus in the Colombian Rainforest

The forested indigenous-owned land in the Piamonte region of Southern Colombia impresses by its extraordinary biodiversity, but lacks permanent structures offering higher education for the young generation tailored to the requirements of a life in the territories: governing their lands, safeguarding their natural environment and culture, as well as building a prosperous and empowered society.

Therefore, a future University Campus embodies the idea of an inter-epistemic dialogue which helps to ground the education in the indigenous reality. A primary objective of this institution-building project is to strengthen and disseminate the ancestral knowledge, know-how and millennial experience, and to buttress these efforts with Western science, technology and productive systems. Locating the University at the confluence of an Indigenous understanding of human interaction with Earth and all species, and Western environmental science sharing these concerns, the cooperation aims to investigate the compatibility of these distinct knowledge systems and the possibilities of merging them in fertile ways.

The intensive collaboration with the parallel design studio at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ) in Bogotá bridges international exchange and knowledge in this preliminary project phase. The two-semester studio with an integrated seminar week in October is enriched by guest lectures of various domains at ETH and exchanges with local experts during the trip. The design studio Universidad Piamonte aims at the creation of a spatial program sensibly embedded in the landscape, as well as the development of architectural ideas and concepts.