The former Banco Anglo Costarricense branch in Santa Cruz occupies a corner plot within the city’s historic grid, diagonal to Parque Bernabela Ramos. The building makes a clear urban gesture from the outset: the ground floor retreats, extending the sidewalk and providing shade to pedestrians under the elevated volume above, particularly at the corner facing the park.

The recessed ground floor allows continuous glazed facades along both street and avenue frontages. The upper floor inverts this logic entirely — solid exposed concrete, protected by integrated parapets and vertical concrete louvers whose rhythm shifts between facades, with nearly double the elements on the south face compared to the east.

Inside, the material language changes register. The smooth exposed concrete of the exterior gives way to thick render and white paint. The double-height main hall is anchored by a massive suspended mezzanine and the stair composition that leads to it. The upper floor completes an unusual program for a bank branch: residential quarters organized around a central garden courtyard, a typology common to provincial branches built outside the Greater Metropolitan Area during this period.

The building’s civic scale, its shaded corner, and its relationship to the park remain arguments for its recovery. ICESA has developed a proposal to return it to public life.