Restaurante y Clínica Ambulatoria
Annex project for the existing CENARE hospital (Centro Nacional de Rehabilitación) in La Uruca, San José, resolving two independent programs located in different sectors of the complex: a new dining facility and a set of ambulatory clinical rooms for outpatient recovery. The 600 m² intervention gives the institution two precise additions that complement, rather than imitate, the surrounding hospital fabric.
The dining facility is organized as a single transparent pavilion that wraps a cluster of solid white volumes. A slender steel frame supports a tensioned fabric ceiling and is enclosed on its perimeter by full-height glazing, dissolving the boundary between interior and garden and washing the terracotta tile floor with filtered daylight. The interior cubes interrupt the continuous space without sealing it off, allowing the dining hall to read simultaneously as one luminous room and as a small village of contained programs, an approach intended to lift the daily ritual of eating out of the institutional weight typical of hospital service spaces.
Each solid volume holds a specific function: a private dining room that can be enclosed for staff events or family gatherings, the service toilets, and at one end a separate kitchen block. Their compact stucco envelopes are punctured only by carefully placed openings — small punched windows and discreet clerestories — that admit controlled, indirect light and keep service areas visually quiet within the open hall. The ambulatory clinic, sited elsewhere on the hospital grounds, follows the same restrained language of white stucco and natural light, adapted to the privacy and concentration that therapy demands.
