Presenting the Fair space as a purely interior city, the Pedro Pitarch architectures & urbanisms studio has created for the 44th edition of the contemporary art fair ARCOmadrid, a Circular Synthetic Ecosystem that claims the emancipation of its materials by re-inventing their uses, applications and life cycles through what they call Artificial Ecology.
The project, like a domesticated metropolis, challenges the fair architecture that is conventionally built on obsolete elements, to work explicitly on architectures and processes endemic to the exhibition sphere that create an unexpected multi-scalar place in charge of housing the different objects, systems, cultures, users and synthetic natures that make up this edition of ARCO.
Fair’s Metropolitanism, ARCO 44 by Pedro Pitarch. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal.
Project description by Pedro Pitarch architectures & urbanisms
The project for the 44th edition of the ARCOmadrid contemporary art fair uses exclusively materials, construction systems and fair ecologies to generate a unique Object-Oriented Urbanism, whose formalization is a Circular Synthetic Ecosystem. Claiming the emancipation of its materials, but also re-inventing its uses, applications and life cycles through an Artificial Ecology.
The urban design of the fair juxtaposes large blocks of galleries with more compact, specifically designed public pieces, generating between them a series of multi-scalar spaces, halfway between the fair and the gallery, between the museum and the living room, producing a Fair Metropolitanism. ARCOmadrid presents itself to us in its 44th edition as a true pop-up metropolis, which appears 5 days a year encapsulated in pavilions 7 and 9 of IFEMA to later disappear, integrating itself into a circular fair economy.
Artificial Ecology
Conventionally, fair architecture for events builds obsolete ecosystems, in which materials, architectures and processes are imported from other contexts outside the fair ecosystem, generating high levels of material and energy waste.
This project proposes to do the radical opposite: to work explicitly with the construction systems, materials, agents, architectures and economies endemic to the fair sphere to generate an unexpected place, which contains all the genetics of the fair: a fair metropolitanism, which builds a unique Artificial Ecology.
Material production has been reduced to a minimum, using unconventional reusable industrialized systems for the construction of architectures, such as lighting trusses. These are complemented with recycled materials that are given a second life within the fair ecosystem on three scales: permanent (within the architecture of IFEMA), ephemeral (in the architecture of other fairs) and infrastructural (in the logistics processes of the galleries).
Circular Synthetic Ecosystem
The Fair is one of the architectural typologies that consumes the most resources and produces the most waste in relation to its short duration, with carbon footprint ratios and kg/day of waste that proportionally exceed those of other more conventional typologies.
ARCO 44 continues to develop the concept of Object-Oriented Urbanism that was already tested in the previous edition, presenting a fair that operates as a Circular Synthetic Ecosystem in which stage trusses, art collectors, packaging materials, fixing systems, gallery owners, cultural programming and works of art simultaneously cohabit an Object-Oriented Urbanism.
Suspended truss systems, recycled uncut rigid boards with factory length, linear meters of reused fair carpet rolls, elastic organic textiles, rented stage lights, art packaging products, ecological waterproofing, OBS fiber panels… These are just some of the elements that shape the proposal. But not functioning as an ex-novo support to be covered, painted or covered, but rather highlighting its construction systems, processes and technologies, and what is more, claiming its emancipation by integrating them into a Circular Synthetic Ecosystem through which dynamics of reuse and recycling are generated in which, after the Fair is over, materials, systems and waste are fully integrated.
Domesticated Metropolis
The spatial design of the fair deliberately renounces the division between urbanism and architecture, producing a multi-scalar organization in which the spaces hybridize domestic and urban scales, even superimposing both.
This strategy is reinforced by the design of an enormous structure suspended from the trusses of the pavilions, which frames the public programs generating a new ceiling plane, domesticating all the urbanism that is below it. This element is not simply a ceiling, but incorporates the entire lighting infrastructure of the architectural pieces that it frames. Infrastructure that in turn extends throughout the fair, implementing a lighting strategy already developed in past editions, which consists of practically doing away with general lighting and replacing it with stage trusses suspended at a height of 4m, producing a plane of light at a domesticated and user-friendly height. The user experience is intended to be closer to that of a visit to a gallery than to a fair pavilion.
Finally, the Food Court pays tribute to the theme of this edition through the design of the "Amazonian Table". It is a common, collective, central and public table, whose geometry literally replicates the layout of the Amazon River through a process of geometric standardization of the geographical layout of its meanders.
The river, far from being converted into an object, becomes a gastronomic context, materialized through an object that catalyzes unexpected spatial relationships, unusual encounters, due to its unique materialization.
The trade fair infrastructure not only offers logistical support, but also gives shape and materiality to the elements of this edition of ARCOmadrid, which is presented to us as an example of Trade Fair Metropolitanism in which the different objects, systems, cultures, users and synthetic natures build a complex multi-scalar context.
