Understanding the urgency of improving the city and the architecture of the city, the Project proposes the following:
1. Urban Complex – Composed of two main volumes: one that is the “protagonist” (the museum), the other as “backdrop” (administration), with two levels of underground parking, where the auditorium is located and a public plaza that occupies more than 50% of the lot. The museum hovers above the plaza.
2. Form - It comes from the study of a geometric form typically used in Pre-Columbian jade objects, especially necklaces: cylinders with an empty bi-conical interior space. This spatial configuration allows a visual continuum from everywhere in the museum. The museum is expressed as a light cylinder (we didn’t want a massive, “blind” and heavy looking building) with a prepatinated copper skin not seeking to imitate jade but to celebrate it as a natural material with an aging process that in copper protects it and eliminates maintenance. This cylinder is open to the city thru an exterior helicoid ramp that allows museum-goers to enjoy the urban panorama especially the one formed by Plaza of Democracy, the National Museum and the Congress. The ramp is then a mixture of protecting overhang…a buffer…a bioclimatic interface that protects the interior of the museum against the harsh poundings of the tropical climate.
3. Bioclimatic Architecture and Responsible Environmental Design – We made every effort to produce a preliminary parametric design in search of the first carbon neutral building in Costa Rica.
