The Billboard Building is a conceptual design for the eastern edge of La Sabana park in central San José. Chronically congested by legal and illegal billboard structures, this prime site of the city is currently devaluated by the visual as well as sonic and environmental pollution caused by the motorized traffic along the perimeter of the park. The urban public space quality of the area is in decline: noisy at daytime and dangerous at night, as a lack of illumination and urban program has created a no-go zone after office hours.
In this context, we developed a set of proposals to use the commercial billboard structures as agents of change, to define scenarios where those structures could actually support or even enable public life and help to create an urban environment to be used 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, all year long.
The Billboard Building creates a win-win situation: it provides a large-scale indoor space for sports and recreation to be used by the students of an adjacent school, as well as the valuable vertical surfaces for a billboard company that is looking for an integrated advertisement space at the park. The prismatic and rotating facade panels multiply the commercial skin of the building and at the same time provide fresh air and natural ventilation for its interior spaces. At night time, the indoor sports facilities are commercially rented out by the school for the use of a popular ball game in order to extend day time uses and finance the purchase of educational equipment for the students.
Credit
A Company (Oliver Schütte, Ronald Fonseca and Christian Castro) for Colorvision.
San José, Costa Rica, 2010.