“Verticality is not democracy.” Notes on the new legislative building in Costa Rica

Abstract

This article is a critical exploration of the process in which the new legislative building in Costa Rica is built in the middle of political, institutional and architectural controversies. We start from a theoretical approaavach that comprehend the building as a sociotechnical artifact with political agencies from the reflections of Trevor Pinch, Wiebe Bijker, Langdon Winner and Albena Yaneva; who will allow us to approach the process and the building as the product of disputes between different social and political forces that struggle to register their interests and where also architecture operates as a technical instrument that generates political dispositions. We do a transdisciplinary approach that allows the comprehension of complexity of a long process that divides itself in multiple directions and is disputed in many arenas. We work with primary sources such as legislative acts, letters, official resolutions, design projects, renders, audiovisual
material, and secondary sources as press and specialized bibliography.