Spatial Design of the Fair – by Pedro Pitarch

The project for the 45th edition of ARCOmadrid continues the exploration of the Object-Oriented Urbanism through the construction of an architecture of the event based exclusively on materials, systems, and ecologies intrinsic to the fair context. The proposal is structured around a Wall conceived as a central architectural device, an abstract plane that simultaneously separates and relates two forms of domesticity: the domestic urbanism of the fair and the urban domesticity of public spaces, operating as boundary, façade, and elevation of the Event.

The fair is understood as a pop-up metropolis that emerges for five days each year within IFEMA’s Halls 7 and 9 and subsequently dissolves, reintegrating into a circular fair economy. The spatial organization eliminates conventional hierarchies of circulation, producing homogeneous flows and reinforcing a continuous, non-hierarchical experience of the event. Within this framework, the Wall does not act as a barrier but as an active plane that constructs a condition of inhabited separation, a liminal artifact that allows both domesticities to coexist without fully overlapping.

The Wall operates as an Anti-Billboard: an architectural surface deliberately devoid of image, text, or content. This renunciation is not an absence but a critical position that questions the billboard format and shifts its representational function toward an ontological transformation, becoming architecture. The fair is neither staged nor represented; it is materialized as an architectural event in which objects, materials, systems, and users coexist within a Circular Synthetic Ecosystem, grounded in a strictly fair-based Artificial Ecology.

ARCHITECTURE STUDIO::

Pedro Pitarch architectures & urbanisms

Architect::

Pedro Pitarch

Team:

Pedro Pitarch

Guillermo Martín-Peñasco

Maia Mesas
Lucía del Rey
Enoc Pascau