Each year Athletic Business awards the world’s best new and recently renovated athletics, fitness and recreation facilities. Sasaki is proud to have the Universidad de Lima Recreation, Wellness and Student Life Center make the list for the 43rd annual Top 10 Facilities of Merit.

The design team developed an innovative approach to the development and organization of program elements for holistic student wellness. The goals of providing students with a much needed centralized home for student life and well-being were achieved based on the students’ level of engagement and feedback from the university.

Highly-active, interconnected indoor and outdoor environments create a new student life hub. The plaza, which also supports major events on campus, links three different quads of the campus and extends into the building’s porous ground floor. The building hovers over an internal courtyard, which helps to funnel the public realm deep into the building across multiple levels. Across its central atrium, building stairs and bridges connect uses and levels promoting wayfinding through alternative circulation routes, where the transparency of the spaces provide visual connections to the diverse program offerings.

The project redefines the character and experience of the campus core by infilling a leftover parcel, turning back of house areas next to the street into a new urban front, and more importantly, redeveloping the ornamental landscape of the parcel into a highly programmable hardscape plaza of civic scale. The building is an extension of the plaza itself with its multistory covered outdoor space and terraces that can be traversed in any direction while becoming a major meeting point for the campus. Dining, student services and recreation uses converge around this new public space exponentially augmenting its utilization and programming.

The project supports the university mission to expand and rethink its core offerings to serve students in unprecedented ways. University of Lima, with its primarily commuter student body, is focused on developing a centralized campus with an unprecedented investment in student life, research, and entrepreneurship to offer a new type of “destination campus” in a region where the norm is to attend class and leave campus. This project embodies the University’s mission. University leadership credits a 30% spike in enrollment over the past two years to the completion and success of the Recreation and Wellness Center.

Congratulations to the design team for this amazing recognition! Athletic Business has published a profile of the project here.