The San Felipe residential complex (Residencial San Felipe), designed and built by a team of architects from the National Housing Board between 1962-1969, is nestled on a 27 hectare lot in the Jesús María District in Lima, Peru. Dubbed as one of the most important infrastructure projects under President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, the housing complex is representative of the modernist ideology of the time that looked to traditional urban concepts to address the country's contemporary housing needs.

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How many architecture students sit down to listen to a community's needs and transform them into a project to be built during the academic term? Few. While there are several participatory courses in universities, they often remain as proposals—brilliant ones, by the way—without ever materializing; though, of course, they leave us inspired. Meanwhile, other projects that do get built do not necessarily involve an exhaustive dialogue with the residents of the site. In recent years, students at Peru's architecture schools are increasingly engaging with reality, recognizing that the country is an experimental laboratory still under construction. And the project presented here is the first of such complexity to be built within a university workshop.

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