The Costa Rica Congress Hall is organized around a series of structurally dependent and interconnected concrete-cast hypercubes clad in steel louvers. The hypercubes gain their strength through physical connectivity. This formal duality demonstrates the precarious role of public buildings in today’s wide-angled democratic environment. The country’s myriad political perspectives are the inspiration for the verdant hanging landscape of sky terraces covered in locally sourced trees and plants that adorn the exterior of the structure. The project’s combination of geometry and nature revisits the legacy of tropical modernism in South America, inviting the citizens of Costa Rica to imagine that architecture can be a host for the meeting of social struggle and ecological fantasy.

Costa Rica has been ranked the most peaceful country in the continent and yet amidst such bureaucratic benevolence, the country supports a loud opposition. Our design for the New Congress Hall hopes to capture this democratic paradox. The building is organized around a series of interconnected hypercubes that hold themselves up; in a structure that creates a civic space for constant public demonstrations out an architectural sense of stability and precariousness.