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Architects: Pedro Pitarch - Architectures & Urbanisms
Text description provided by the architects. The spatial design project for the 43rd edition of the ARCOmadrid fair is conceived as a large Domestic Urbanism, as a true pop-up city, purely interior, which develops over 5 days within pavilions 7 and 9 of IFEMA. In formal terms, the project advocates for the emancipation of materials, construction systems, and fair ecologies to generate a unique Object-Oriented Urbanism. From a conceptual point of view, ARCO43 develops simultaneously at two scales: urban and architectural.
Domestic Urbanism. At the urban scale, and through general planning, a distribution of the required uses in specific, compact, and pragmatic pieces is proposed, containing the most concrete or private programs, to generate public spaces that function as small domestic squares that, halfway between the street and the living room, between the city and the gallery, produce a Domestic Urbanism. These interstitial spaces are equipped with furniture whose design hybridizes domestic forms with purely urban material finishes, resulting in a unique overlapping of the two spheres.
This Domestic Urbanism is reinforced by a lighting strategy that takes as a reference the one already tested in the past 42nd edition, minimizing the general overhead lighting of the pavilions as much as possible and operating mainly with lighting suspended from trusses at a height of 4m. In this way, the user's perception changes radically when the "ceiling plane" immediately moves from the 12m of the roof to the 4m marked by the new light plane floating at a more domestic height, leaving everything above it in an ignored shadow.
Synthetic Ecosystems. At the architectural level, the project exclusively uses fair materials, objects, and construction systems, offering a twist of the same. Advocating for their aesthetics, but also reinventing their most conventional use. Usually, in event fair architecture, situations are simulated that are unrelated to the fair ecosystem. Architectures from other contexts are imported or scenarios are recreated that, under fake architecture, simulate situations. Some are more literal, others more conceptual, but in any case, they all divert attention from the context in which events like ARCO take place, trying to use architecture as a mere disguise. This project proposes to do radically the opposite: work explicitly with the construction systems, materials, agents, architectures, and economies endemic to the fair sphere to generate an unexpected place, but one that contains all that genetic of the fair: a fair metropolitanism, generating a unique Artificial Ecology.
Hung truss systems, DM boards with a maximum length of 3.66m, linear meters of fair carpet roll, elastic textiles, scenic spotlights, impact-resistant mineral insulation, ecological waterproofing, and OBS panels. These are just some of the elements that will shape the proposal. But not functioning as a support to cover paint, or cover, but rather highlighting these construction systems, processes, and technologies, and what's more, advocating for their emancipation and proposing to test what could be an Object-Oriented Urbanism.
ARCO 43 is presented as a synthetic ecosystem in which scenic trusses, art collectors, insulating materials, fixing systems, gallery owners, cultural programs, and artworks coexist simultaneously in the same Domestic Urbanism.
