Innovative
Architecture School Closes in Costa Rica
By Clifford A. Pearson
Nearly 16 years after founding Costa Rica’s
trailblazing architecture school,
Universidad del Diseño (UniDis), Alvaro
Rojas, AIA, has decided to close it.
Financial considerations and competition
from a growing number of for-profit schools
drove the decision, says Rojas. “For the
past six or seven years, the majority of our
teaching staff has worked pro-bono,”
explains Rojas, and he has subsidized the
school’s operations out of his own financial
resources.
Although it graduated only 71 students since
it opened in 1993, UniDis changed the
profile of architecture in Costa Rica and
served as an important platform for the
teaching of green design. In 1993, only two
other schools offered degree programs in
architecture, the public Universidad de
Costa Rica (UCA) and the private Universidad
Autonoma de Centroamerica (UACA). Frustrated
with the quality of architectural education
in the country, Rojas, a Costa Rica native
who had trained and then taught at City
College in New York, opened UniDis to
provide more in-depth training in smaller
classes with greater interaction between
students and professors. “UniDis was an
experimental school with a simple
objective,” states Rojas, “prepare top-notch
architects for Costa Rica and the world.” To
do this, though, the school required
students to go through a longer and more
expensive program than its competitors.
Architectural culture has shallow roots in
Costa Rica, where the first degree program
began only in 1971. Before then, Costa
Ricans went abroad to study architecture,
mostly in Mexico. UniDis, though, shook up
the status quo, and a dozen new private
architecture schools opened in a country
with only 4.2 million people. Offering less
intense and cheaper programs and spending
money on marketing themselves, these schools
made it increasingly difficult for UniDis to
survive, explains Rojas. Most of the new
private schools charge around $2,000 per
year in tuition, compared to $3,500 for
UniDis, according to Rojas.
UniDis distinguished itself by training
students to think of buildings within the
context of the city, to understand the
importance of environmental sustainability,
and to engage with architectural communities
beyond the borders of Costa Rica. In 1999,
Rojas organized a bi-annual symposium called
Mundaneum, which brought international
practitioners and academics such as Michael
Rotondi, Charles Jencks, Carlos Jimenez,
James Wines, Craig Hodgetts, Enrique Norten,
and Michael Sorkin to speak at the school.
UniDis also placed its students in
internships at foreign firms such as the
Renzo Piano Building Workshop, RoTo
Architects, and TEN Arquitectos.
“The school took architecture to another
level,” says Andrea Gonzalez, who graduated
this year and interned with Piano. “It
opened our minds and gave us great exposure
to the world. It made us think in terms of
society and community and offered us the
opportunity to meet great architects.”
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