Question and Symbol: Challenges for a Contemporary Bell Tower

Historically, bell towers have been religious and architectural symbols in the landscape that summoned the faithful to celebrations and fulfilled a crucial territorial significance task. This function was assumed by the towers of some universities. The real need of the University Francisco de Vitoria to build a bell tower for its new chapel and to be significant both for its campus and the city is the pretext to investigate the need for this element in the current context through an academic exercise with architecture students. Traditionally, the religious autority proposed a concrete celebration space. In this case, architecture students were commissioned to propose a contemporary response for the new bell tower of their university campus through a Design Workshop. The workshop result raises interesting questions about what the architecture of a bell tower should be like in the XXI century, the relationship with public space, the construction of a landmark on an urban scale, the need to respond to both the city and the immediate environment at its different scales, the obsolescence of elements such as clocks or bells, and, above all, the relevance of symbols and the way that architecture raises questions in the contemporary landscape.