Energy Retrofit of Public School Infrastructure: Winners of the Proyectar a Conciencia 4.0 Competition

Read the original version in Spanish here.

Published on July 06, 2026

The Proyectar a Conciencia competition aims to energetically modernize existing buildings through non-intrusive passive solutions, such as EIFS continuous exterior insulation technologies. This fourth edition was particularly special, adding the Chilean Chamber of Construction as a co-sponsor, tripling its prizes, and expanding the call for entries to the professional sphere.

Since this edition focused on the energy retrofitting of public school infrastructure, professionals from the Public Education Directorate and the Ministry of Energy—who are currently working on the Public Educational Infrastructure Energy Efficiency Improvement Program under the 2018-2022 Energy Route—were consulted regarding the feasibility of executing the projects emerging from the competition. Consequently, delivering these proposals to the Local Public Education Services was identified as an opportunity, allowing them to evaluate advancing both winning and non-winning projects to the construction phase.

Participants were required to select an existing school, generate a three-dimensional information model of the building and its intervention, and submit plans and a project brief via a PowerPoint presentation. The winners will donate their "BIM" models to the Ministry of Energy and the Public Education Directorate, while those who did not place can use their digital projects to present them independently to the relevant authorities.

Context

The Ministry of Energy and the Public Education Directorate are currently working under a collaboration agreement active through December 2021. Its primary goal is to generate and execute thermal retrofitting projects in public educational institutions, with an average investment of 6.5 UF/m² of built project area. The stages for each project include energy diagnosis, project design, bidding, and execution.

According to architect Jadille Baza, President of the Architects Association of Chile, MINEDUC Advisor, and former Head of Infrastructure at MINEDUC, "this will allow the school administrators in all three cases to have solid projects in their portfolios to apply for the funds allocated for these purposes. Often, resources go unused because there are no high-quality projects available to be funded. Therefore, in these three cases, I believe the contribution to these municipalities will be extremely significant."

Despite the crises, emergencies, tensions, speculation, obstacles, complications, and everything else that 2020 brought, architect Nicolas Schultz, Product Manager at Sto Chile and General Coordinator & Director of "Proyectar a Conciencia," highlights the major achievements of this edition of the competition: "We successfully brought together industry, the construction sector, the architectural field, and the public sector to generate and donate energy retrofitting projects for existing public school infrastructure to municipal entities. The commitment of the participants lays the groundwork for this initiative to grow, so we invite you to follow us at @proyectar.a.conciencia, where we will share content about the future of all these projects."