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While teams and projects tend to be multidomain, the infrastructure required to integrate and build prototypes lags behind to allow an efficient interaction and to offer multi-disciplinary facilities. Hence this paper presents an infrastructure approach developed in a Latin American academic context, where the concept of an Engineering Building is explained in order to support the demands of a 3rd Generation University. A deeper emphasis of this article is placed upon the development of a Technology Integration Laboratory in terms of functionality, capacity, adjacencies, furnishing and, physiologic and psicologic support. The layout design is based on the concepts of Mechatronics and Technical Systems while enhancing a teaching-learningbuilding process. After 5 years of operation the results obtained in terms of prototyping, filed patents and projects with the triad government-industry-academy are discussed. Our experience shows that such hands-on engineering facilities are worth having, especially within a virtual education growing trend, and that openness has influenced an increment of the Intellectual Property results.

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Solar energy is expected to be the fastest developing of the Renewable Energy Sources (RES) in the next years. With the introduction of Distributed Generation into space limited urban areas, the need to find new solutions that allow the installations of Photovoltaic (PV) systems in cities has become crucial for the constant and sustainable energetic development of the world. This study presents new experimental and simulation analyses of the implementation of vertical Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV), one of the most accepted alternatives for the installation of PV technologies in urban areas. Emphasis is made on the viability of BIPV in selected tropical regions from an energy generation standpoint. The results suggest that the implementation of these technologies is viable for urban spaces in the studied regions, as it was found that east and west facing vertical modules require only twice the space of horizontal modules to equal their energy generation, and the vertical area available in buildings can be up to 20 times larger than the horizontal. Additionally, energy generation in this location was found to be relatively constant throughout the year for east and west facing vertical BIPV installations.

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