Centro Educativo Playa Brasilito

Abstract

Brasilito is a small coast town of approximately 1000 habitants located in the northern region of Costa Rica, specifically in the province of Guanacaste, embracing the Brasilito bay in the Pacific Ocean, in a zone filled with high economical contrasts with its past, a town that left the fields and the agriculture and traded it for hotels and tourists, a town that left a simple farmers lifestyle and changed it for a constant cultural exchange, showing the costarican beauty to the foreigner visiting a “tropical paradise”. The economic development pressures have forced Brasilito to take a role in the big touristic scheme in Guanacaste, with many different entities intervening directly or indirectly in the lifestyle of its inhabitants, added to this, a frail social and governmental structure has left the town with low resilience to endure natural phenomena that might come to shake things up even more. Nicoya’s earthquake, in 2012, proved just that frailty in the social and urban structure in Brasilito, the quake broke down the main classrooms of the former School of Brasilito, leaving the town without a proper space for teaching even until now; it has been a process of years to reincorporate after the disaster. A town’s education is its development engine, the children and adults’ education in Brasilito is of main importance in its future projection and communal reincorporation on the national tourism scheme, it’s a banner for the progress of the bay’s inhabitants and their capacity to endure an always changing economic panorama, that is the motivation of this investigation. The town’s development, Brasilito’s children’s future is what motivates the construction of a school that addresses not only it’s spatial necessity but also its social, urban and environmental needs while defining a key stone of communal identity. This research explores the history, way of life, future projections and environmental climactic conditions as to answer with an integral project guided mainly by the hands of the community itself in the way of its own development, this research addresses the role of the architect and architecture itself as a tool of concretion of communal and social ideas in a space that respects and gives back to the town that builds it.