IESEC University

IESEC University by Dellekamp + Schleich reimagines the campus as a small city, organized around the idea of one polis, one campus, one agora. Set in Saltillo, in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, the project unites two universities under a single ground: one of art and one of science. Its director sought a campus utopian enough to carry his pedagogical ideals yet realistic enough to function within a limited budget, and that tension shapes every part of the scheme.

The site sits within the university city of the Polis, resting on two of its most important mobile axes. Rather than turning inward behind walls, the design invites the surrounding city to enter. An Agora connects the project with the urban scale around it, and a crossing porch acts as a gradual programmatic threshold, easing visitors from the fully public realm into the more private spaces of study and research. This sequence of public to private is a defining gesture of the whole composition.

Designing a Campus as a City

Educational architecture has long borrowed the language of the city, because a campus must hold many overlapping uses without losing a sense of shared identity. Lecture halls, studios, libraries, and informal meeting spaces each ask for different qualities of light, acoustics, and enclosure, yet they all depend on the in-between zones where students cross paths. The classical idea of the agora as a gathering place gives this campus a clear civic heart, turning circulation into something closer to public life than mere movement between rooms.

Working within a modest budget is a familiar constraint in educational architecture, and it often pushes designers toward clarity rather than excess. Simple, legible volumes and well-placed thresholds can do the work that costly ornament cannot, letting the plan itself create variety and orientation. By rooting the buildings in the existing axes of Saltillo, the architects tie academic life to the rhythms of the city around it.

The result reads less like a closed institution and more like a fragment of an open town, where learning and public space share the same threshold. For Dellekamp + Schleich, that openness is the real lesson of the project.