Norte Sur Arquitectos has finished a school in a remote agricultural village surrounded by yucca and papaya plantations, very close to the tropical forest of La Fortuna de San Carlos, Costa Rica.
The building designed by Norte Sur arquitectos, is a bioclimatic structure designed to generate a safe and playful environment that fosters a sense of community and pride for the children that make up a student population, made up of 90% of the children of migrant families who live by below the poverty level.

The entire program is resolved in a pavilion with three levels that takes advantage of the pre-existing topography. A wooden structure adds warmth and a diagonal rhythm that breaks the horizontality of the volume and crosses through the building to unify and alternate the different heights and scales between the different levels.
 

Description of project by Norte Sur arquitectos

The school is located in Sector Angeles, a remote citadel surrounded by yucca and papaya plantations, at only 15 kilometers from the tropical forest of La Fortuna de San Carlos. It’s student population is 90% formed by children of migrant families who live below the poverty level and in a situation of social vulnerability. For most students, the school provides a safe environment and the only complete meal of the day, one of the main reasons that prevents them from dropping out of school, while their parents’s economy, mostly single women, depends on agricultural activities, which are the main source of their livelihoods.

Norte Sur Arquitectos rethinks the traditional school’s institutional presence as the primary visual and cultural image of the traditional public education to create a colorful landmark that disrupts the monotony of the deep green landscape, to allow the students, school leadership, staff, and parents to develop a fresh and positive image of their physical space and an emotional connection to foster a sense of pride and ownership.

To provide with a comfortable learning environment in a hot and humid tropical region, where the rainy season lasts 9 months a year, the school is a passive bioclimatic structure that allows the building to breath, composed by low maintenance prefabricated systems and low cost materials that come together for construction economy and due to the lack of space to store materials during the construction process.

The entire program is solved in one pavilion with three levels that takes advantage of the preexistent topography of the narrow plot. A wooden skeleton adds warmth and a playful diagonal rhythm across the building, to unify and alternate the different heights and scales between one level and the other. It also contains a gallery where the main circulation areas look down to the lower level corridor, which also serves as a polyvalent space for community meetings, school’s gathering events and playground for the children during the rainy days.

All the classrooms and the cafeteria windows are oriented to capture the diffuse light of the north along the day. A translucent breathing envelope supported by the wooden frames softens and filters the direct sunlight from the south, allowing for crossed ventilation and to gaze at the views towards the green surrounding landscape.

 

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Architects
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Norte Sur Arquitectos. Angeles Solís
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Design Team
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Isidro Ramírez, Marco Carrillo
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Collaborators
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Structural Engineering.- Ingeniería Cañas
Electrical engineering.- Proeléctrica
Mechanical Engineering.- Karina Ocampo
Project management.- Javier Brenes, Carlos Fallas, Eylin Leiva
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Main contractor
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Rovi de San Carlos
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Area
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1803m²
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Dates
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Completed.- 2018
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Norte Sur Arquitectos is a Costa Rican firm founded 20 years ago by Isidro Ramírez and María de los Ángeles Solís. Later they are associated with Victor Murillo and Javier Brenes, where they lead a diverse and flexible team of professionals dedicated to the production of creative ideas and the technical development of them to explore the uniqueness of each project through networking. transversality and diversity in order to create spaces for being, in a time and place.

They believe in collaborative work close to the client and that is not limited to generating answers, but questions that add value to the proposals in the search for emotion and delight, the experience of the space, its integration into the immediate context and a detailed definition technique to achieve its constructive execution.
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Published on: October 31, 2018
Cite: "A public school in the rainforest of Costa Rica by Norte Sur Arquitectos" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/a-public-school-rainforest-costa-rica-norte-sur-arquitectos> ISSN 1139-6415
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