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.

The building comprises a series of structurally interdependent 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.

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.

• SIZE: 300,205 SQF
• PROJECT TEAM: Carlos Arnaiz, Laura del Pino
• CLIENT: Costa Rica Government