For the 40+1 section, Pedro Pitarch makes a variation on the traditional arrangement of this type of fair, normally corridors that give access to rooms, to propose a new "purely interior experience" as a "casual drift".
The architect rotates the grid proposed for the project by 9º, to introduce the visitor to a different experience from the rest of the Art Fair, close to the process of continuously going through museum rooms, eliminating circulation spaces.
Sección Especial «ARCO 40+1» by Pedro Pitarch. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal
Floor plan. Special section «ARCO 40+1» by Pedro Pitarch.
Project description by Pedro Pitarch
The Arco 40+1 section is conceived as an imaginary museum. An intervention that proposes the inversion of the spatial logic of art fairs.
Opposite to traditional distribution, in which the space of each gallery is normally perceived as an exterior accessible from a corridor; the 40+1 section is conceived as a purely interior experience, as a sequence of concatenated rooms that import the museum context into the fair.
Everything inside is contained. Each gallery has an identical space but is adapted to the requirements of the exhibited pieces. Almost as if we were going through rooms of a museum, the section dispenses with circulation spaces, proposing the drift of the visitor from one room to the next.
This migration from fair to museum architecture is intensified through a change in the rhythm of circulation. To do this, the reticular plan of the project is rotated 9º, breaking the orthogonality with respect to the routes of the rest of the fair and generating a slowdown in the traffic of the visitor.
It is precisely this gesture, rotating the matrix, which generates an unexpected architectural element. An outer skin that works as a file. A remaining space between grid and perimeter. A thick skin, endowed with a program, that thickens and not only serves as a support to expose the historical archive of the 40th anniversary but also incorporates architectural content: a work area, a projection room, a meeting area, and the newspaper library. of Arc.
Finally, the section is divided in two as it is crossed by the central corridor of the fair, which dramatically cuts through the grid and introduces the visitor directly into the museum interior.
The project for the 40+1 section does not have an architectural elevation, because its elevation is precisely its content, the works exhibited by gallery owners and artists, as well as the fair's forty-year history itself.
