The Fermín Caballero building and the beginnings of the ESI
The building Fermin Knight It is named after the 1th century Spanish geographer, journalist, writer, politician and orator [XNUMX]. Although it had no relationship with the province of Ciudad Real (it did with that of Cuenca, where he was born and attended his first studies), the Faculty of Letters, which then inhabited the building, decided to give it that name in recognition of its many merits.
The Rural Fund of Ciudad Real provided the financing for the construction of the building as the headquarters of a university hall of residence, that is, a student residence. That is what appears on the vacant lot sign shown in the following photograph. In the background you can see the current Faculty of Education (Teaching), on the left, and the School of Languages, on the right. The construction was established on a plot of 7.380 m2 ceded by the City Council of Ciudad Real, whose first stone was laid in 1977.
The building was inaugurated in 1979, but not as a student residence but as the headquarters of the existing University College of Ciudad Real, financed by the aforementioned Rural Fund and by the Provincial Council, which was the germ in the province of the future University of Castilla-La Mancha. At that time, the University College was a center attached to the Complutense University of Madrid that taught the first three courses of three degrees: Geography and History, Philology and Chemical Sciences. The students had to travel to Madrid to complete the last two years of said studies.
This change of use allowed make visible, somehow, the social claim by university centers in Ciudad Real. Above all, since the important demonstration in the capital on December 20, 1977 to reclaim the University, which brought together some seven thousand people. The newspaper archive shows that it was occupied from Calle Mata to Plaza de la Diputación, passing through the center, Plaza Mayor and Calle Toledo.
Our center, the University School of Informatics (EUI) was created in August 1989 and the first Informatics study plan, as a diploma, saw the light of day in October of that same year. The EUI would become the School of Computer Science (ESI) in 1998, with the teaching of higher studies in computer engineering.
There is an anecdotal parallelism between the University College and the Higher School of Informatics. The University College began its classes in the premises of the School of Agricultural Technical Engineering (ITA) and moved to the Fermín Caballero building in 1979. Similarly, the old University School of Informatics (EUI) spent its first years in spaces, existing or built former teacherthat, from the ITA building, until its transfer in 1999 to the Fermín Caballero building. We are heading, therefore, to 25 years of enjoying this building as our headquarters.
The Fermín Caballero building, designed by the architect José Luis Burgos, is very unique [2]: the plan offers total transparency in a perfect combination of concrete, white spaces -currently the exterior tone is cream- and glass, with the use of brick Red on the inside, it has a semi-octagonal shape that creates a concave space facing south towards which the 150.000 tiles that make up its roofs look, and it has an assembly hall in a protruding wedge. As a historical curiosity, it should be noted that this assembly hall hosted the opening of the first university course of the UCLM in 1982 [3], with the newly created University in the month of June, although the academic activity and classes would not begin until the year 1985.
The building underwent a structural remodeling in 1998 to receive the studies of Computer Science and the Industrial and Road Schools, with which we shared a building for a course, and which had very different needs in terms of classrooms and laboratories than those of the degrees that were given in previous years. On the other hand, IT, its infrastructures and teaching equipment, and teaching methodologies have evolved a lot in recent years, which is why the building has had to continue adapting to new uses, also to enable the maximum safe attendance that we should have adopted. in the pandemic.
The building has a strong heart and muscles, but its skin reflects the wrinkles and cracks of wisdom and its long and exciting history.
Two articles presenting more details about the building can be read below:
- The farm that raised college students
- From the University College of Ciudad Real to the UCLM: Memories and demand
Francisco Ruiz. ESI Professor. Former student of the University College (1977-1980), he lived the inauguration of the building.
Crescencio Bravo. ESI Professor. Former student of the EUI (1989-1992)
References
[1] Wikipedia: Fermin Caballero [2] Urban Geography of Ciudad Real (1255-1980). Felix Pillet. Akal editor, 1984. [3] The University, a challenge for Castilla-La Mancha. Esmeralda Munoz, Isidro Sanchez. Almud, editions of Castilla-La Mancha, 2003.
