Object Oriented Urbanism. ARCO 43 by Pedro Pitarch

Project description by Pedro Pitarch

The spatial design project for the 43rd edition of the ARCOmadrid fair is presented as a great Domestic Urbanism, as a true pop-up city, purely interior, which takes place for 5 days within pavilions 7 and 9 of IFEMA. At a formal level, the project demands the emancipation of materials, construction systems, and fair ecologies to generate a unique Object Oriented Urbanism.

From a conceptual point of view, ARCO43 is developed simultaneously on two scales: one urban and the other architectural.

Domestic Urban Planning

At the urban scale, and through general planning, a distribution of the required uses is proposed in specific, compact and pragmatic pieces, which contain the most concrete or private programs, to generate among them public places that function as small domestic squares that, Straddling the street and the living room, between the city and the gallery, they produce a Domestic Urbanism. These interstitial spaces are equipped with furniture whose design has hybridized apparently domestic forms with purely urban material finishes, generating, as a consequence, a unique superposition of the two spheres.


ARCO 43 by Pedro Pitarch. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal.

This Domestic Urbanism is reinforced by a lighting strategy that takes as a reference point that was already tested in the last 42nd edition, reducing the general overhead lighting of the pavilions to the minimum possible and operating fundamentally with lighting lowered from the truss at 4m high. height. In this way, the user's perception changes radically when the “ceiling plane” is immediately moved from the 12 m of the roof to the 4 m marked by the new plane of light that floats at a more domestic height, leaving everything in a shadow ignored. that is above him.

Synthetic Ecosystems

At an architectural level, the project uses exclusively fair materials, objects, and construction systems, offering a twist on them. Claiming its aesthetics, but also re-inventing its more conventional use.

Usually, in event fair architecture, there is a tendency to simulate situations outside the fair ecosystem itself. Architectures are imported from other contexts or scenarios are recreated that, under a fake architecture, simulate situations. Some are more literal, others more conceptual, but in any case all of them look away 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: to 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 genetics of the fair: a fair metropolitanism, which generates a unique Artificial Ecology.


ARCO 43 by Pedro Pitarch. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal.

Hanging truss systems, MDF boards with a maximum length of 3.66m, linear meters of fairground carpet roll, elastic textiles, stage spotlights, anti-impact mineral insulation, ecological waterproofing, 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 evidencing these construction systems, processes, and technologies, and what is more, claiming their emancipation and proposing to test what an Object Oriented Urbanism could be.

ARCO 43 is presented as a synthetic ecosystem in which scenic trusses, art collectors, insulating materials, fixing systems, gallery owners, cultural programming, and works of art simultaneously coexist in the same Domestic Urbanism.