Costa Rica Congress Hall
What grounds a civic space in its community?
Our design for Costa Rica’s new Congress Hall revisits the country’s legacy of tropical modernism, inviting citizens of Costa Rica to imagine how architecture can embody social struggle and a new vision for an ecological future.
Location
San Jose, Costa Rica
Research Areas Parametric Design
Typology Civic Building
Size
Large
300,205 sq.ft.
Status Complete
Project Team Carlos ArnaizLaura del Pino
We consider each project on its own terms and develop tailored responses. Learn about our vision and mission.
The building comprises a series of structurally interdependent modular hypercubes clad in steel louvers. Each cube appears as a unit, but each gains its strength through physical connectivity. This formal duality invites reflection on the role of the public in contemporary democracies, which depend on the productive interaction of a multiplicity of individual viewpoints and perspectives—an approach informed by distributive networks and parametric design.
Paying homage to the central role Costa Rica’s ecology plays in its identity and history, the building hosts a series of verdant hanging landscapes and sky terraces covered in native trees and plantings that invite the landscape into the structure itself, aligning with principles of metabolic architecture, resiliency, and eco-industrialization.
