Founded in 1821, the University of Buenos Aires had its first seat on Perú street, in what is now known as the
Manzana de las Luces, a compound previously owned by the
Society of Jesus. Toward the 1950s, some of the university's faculties still had to use old, overcrowded buildings, leading to proposals to establish a centralized campus for the university somewhere in Buenos Aires. One of these, for instance, proposed the establishment of a "university city" in the empty terrains where the
Aeroparque Jorge Newbery now stands. In 1956, the university began developing a modernization plan which included the establishment of a "Commission for the Construction of a University City", formed by academics and architects such as
Alberto Prebisch. The original plan sought to benefit the most relegated faculties in the university first, envisioning a staggered construction plan. Initially, the campus'
Pabellón I would be assigned to the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences,
Pabellón II to
Philosophy and Letters,
Pabellón III to Architecture and Urbanism, and
Pabellón IV to
Economic Sciences. The complex was also to house the
rector's offices and the university's central library. Nowadays, FADU and FCEN are the only two faculties to have their seat at Ciudad Universitaria, alongside a number of research centers and other minor facilities. In 1958, during the administration of Rector
Risieri Frondizi, a decree issued by the President of Argentina granted the terrains where Ciudad Universitaria presently stands to the University of Buenos Aires. The terrains were land
reclaimed from the on the Northern end of Buenos Aires City, in the neighborhood of
Belgrano. The blueprints followed a proposal by Swiss architect
Le Corbusier from 1938 (in collaboration with and Kurchan), and re-adapted by the city government's 1962
Plan Regulador. The final projects were drawn in 1959 by a team of FADU architects, made up of Francisco and Raúl Rossi, Elio Vivaldi, Enrique Massarotti, Alberto Trozzoli and Florencio Alvo. The government of President
José María Guido scrapped the original plan and decided to launch a new contest to find a new masterplan proposal. The winners of the contest were US-based architects
Eduardo Catalano and Horacio Caminos, alongside engineer Federico Camba. The following year, the new plan was approved, and construction started on
Pabellón I, which was to house the FCEN departments of mathematics, physics and meteorology. This first building was completed in 1961 and additionally house the Instituto de Cálculo. The Pabellón de Industrias was finished shortly afterwards.
Ciudad Universitaria today , with
Towers of Memory by Norberto Gómez in the foreground
Pabellón III, the third-largest building in the plan, originally designed to house the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, was re-designed to house the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, which began operating in the building in 1971.
Pabellón II had been completed the year prior in 1970. A number of proposals to finish the original masterplan have surged since the return of democracy in 1983. A 2006 proposal to finally erect
Pabellón V and grant it to the
Faculty of Psychology even won a bidding contest in the name of the architecture firm Diéguez-Fridman, but the proposal was never followed through. During the 1980s a number of smaller buildings were completed near
Pabellón I. These were granted to the two
CONICET institutes affiliated with UBA, the Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio (IAFE), designed by Rodolfo Livingston, and the Instituto de Geocronología y Geología Isotópica (INGEIS), both completed in 1984. In 1986,
FADU's Secretariat of University Habitat drew an "urbanization plan" with participation of Mederico Faivre, Carlos Maffeis, María Cecilia Ceim, Mario Sacco, among other architects. The plan envisioned the construction of a new railway station within Ciudad Universitaria to grant better access to the complex, a pedestrian street connecting all of the complex's buildings, new housing projects for students and professors, two public parks, an open area for street vendors, among other initiatives. By 1988, only the pedestrian access connecting FADU and FCEN had been completed. The two public parks proposed by the 1986 urbanization plan were finished in the 2000s, when they were re-envisioned as the
Parque de la Memoria, which opened in 2005. Recent developments in Ciudad Universitaria include a new building for the Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias (IFiByNe) and the
Cero + Infinito building, designed by
Rafael Viñoly and Sebastián Ceria, which serves as an annex for FCEN.
Cero + Infinito was completed in 2019. The
Ciudad Universitaria railway station was opened in 2015, connecting the complex to the
Belgrano Norte railway line. ==Settlements and occupations==