Liceo Franco Costarricense

Award-winning intervention on the existing campus of the Liceo Franco Costarricense in Concepción de Tres Ríos, Cartago. The 10,000 m² project reuses a set of pre-existing buildings of limited architectural value and compromised structural condition, stitching them together with a lightweight connective architecture that transforms the school into a contemporary, bioclimatic learning environment.

The brief centered on a pedagogical conviction: today a school must do more than transmit knowledge — it must support the integral development of each student, much of which happens outside the classroom. The institution asked for spaces where students could gather, reflect, recreate, and ultimately recognize themselves in their school. Our response gave the same design weight to corridors, thresholds, courtyards, and shaded gathering points as to the teaching spaces themselves, turning circulation into a continuous landscape of informal learning and social encounter.

The architectural strategy preserves and repurposes the existing structures, while a new lightweight system of roofs, walkways, and transitional volumes unifies them and resolves their deficiencies. Generous overhangs, cross-ventilation, and filtered daylight respond to the local climate without mechanical reliance, while a restrained palette and consistent geometry give the heterogeneous original buildings a single, current identity. The result is a renewed campus that honors its history, optimizes a constrained budget through reuse, and gives the students a place they can claim as their own.