The building now occupied by UISALUD, the Specialized Health Unit of the UIS, is one of the most emblematic and visited buildings on the central campus of the university. Several generations of professors, students and administrative employees have passed through its corridors and halls, and for several years now, hundreds of people from the university community, as well as retirees and their families, have been receiving care in its facilities on a daily basis.
This building, designed by architect Mario Pilonieta González and built by engineer José Rafael Olaya Guerrero, was commissioned in 1963. “It is a typical design of modern architecture, which focuses more on organicist or organic architecture,” says architect Gilberto Camargo Amorocho, a specialist in planning for environmental education and an expert in hospital architecture. He adds: “It is a characteristic of the building that the educational standard is very well expressed. The building was designed to have classrooms and laboratories, an administrative area, an office area for teachers with well-defined fixed points.
On the other hand, Camargo explains that, “at that time there was not yet talk of the rights of the disabled, so the building is apparently hard for the techniques that were spoken, but the beautiful things that the building had when one studies its first historical process, when Mario Pilonieta from the Department of Physical Plant of the UIS begins to shape the design, is that the design is very well analyzed from the point of view of the environment, very well managed the ‘sunlight’, the air currents. That gave a characteristic of the location of the building. The facades that do not receive the sun, both north and south, are the longest facades and the facades that reject the sun are the shortest facades. So everything that is the composition of the ‘fenestration’ really receives the light from the north or the light from the south and manages the air currents in this part of Bucaramanga, which are practically the currents of the Suratá River Valley”.
Initially, this building was used as the headquarters of the Physics laboratories. In 1988, the building became home to the facilities of the Social Welfare Fund and the UIS Employees Fund, Capruis and Favuis, respectively, entities associated with the welfare of the university community and university employees. In that year, a floor was added and its original features were changed to accommodate medical offices.
“The laboratory was changed, the architecture really broke the original principle that ‘function generates form’: the ‘academy’ function, the teaching of physics, the physics laboratory, became health, consulting rooms, the administration of health services,” says architect Gilberto Camargo. “I participated many times in that adaptation, and when the standard arrived, we managed to adapt the building so that the form was not a problem, so that it really functioned as a health service,” adds Camargo Amorocho.
In 2017, after undergoing structural reinforcement and modernization of its facilities, this building was transformed, along with all of its services, into the headquarters of this unit, which was renamed UISALUD, the Specialized Health Unit of the Universidad Industrial de Santander. This work was carried out by Fabián Camargo Arquitectos, who carried out a complete intervention to recover its original architectural forms, enhance its heritage values and update its physical and technological infrastructure for health care.
The UISALUD building has been declared an asset of municipal cultural interest, with conservation level 2.
