The pavilion consists of three main zones: the forest, the restaurant, and the sponsor's area. The forest is the main area, it is outdoor, yellow, daytime, wooded, and extensive. While the restaurant takes you back inside, blue, nocturnal, cozy, and welcoming.
A series of furniture is arranged around the space in a disorderly way, disobeying the usual contract furnishing guidelines, and encouraging a relaxed and relaxed use, in which users can reconfigure their arrangement as if they were garden chairs.
Description of project by Studio Animal + Estudio Gonzalo del Val + Toni Gelabert Arquitecte
Every year, ARCO fair announces an open competition for the design of their VIP Room, this time marking a very special occasion on behalf of its 40th anniversary. This project arises from a very particular context: after several months of lockdown we are still under an unusual healthcare situation and global uncertainty. With this premise in mind, the proposal answers in a safe and optimistic way to such relevant circumstances.
The project develops a strategy based on three main criteria: safety, exhibition and exterior design.
1.- Safety
“SALIDA” reveals and normalizes the social distance established during the pandemic, celebrating how bodies relate and interact with each other in the public space that we have now internalised with the new measures that mark our encounters. The pavilion materialises this distance in a 3x3 metres grid that works as a beaconing of the interior of the VIP Room and defines the space where to meet and connect safely.
2.- Fair Context
The proposal utilises only elements related to the exhibiting and fair context: floorboard, chipboard walls and carpet. The pavilion repeats the constructive logic of the rest of the stands in the fair, willing to integrate itself as a new element within ARCO. The floorboard rises 60cm above ground level, generating a space enclosed by a continuous perimeter of 2,40 meters high. This elevated platform will help differentiate the VIP room from the other galleries. Besides, the prefabricated system of the floorboard provides an adaptable and flexible solution, giving order to the beaconing grid. The interior of the pavilion results in a huge abstract vase of 1000m2 carpeted in yellow.
3.- Exteriorism
The pavilion crystalizes a collective desire after months of lockdown: the illusion of being outside. The design transports the visitor to an exterior landscape within the interior space of ARCO. A forest of 100 birch trees displays on the grid. These trees are the natural beacons which organize the visitors’ exchanges and build a fictional and ludic atmosphere.
At the end of the fair, the forest will be planted on a new site. They will go back to the outside, ensuring that the waste of the pavilion’s construction and its ecological footprint are minimum. The birch forest will be able to grow outside this ephemeral context. Lastly, a huge sun crowns the space in a never-ending twilight, like a dream.
Finally, the lighting is essential to finish generating this outdoor atmosphere. A huge sun of five meters in diameter crowns this place; and thanks to software used in scenography, the lighting of the pavilion is programmed. In this area, the fairground lights are turned off. A series of RGB spotlights suspended from the truss at a height of nine meters tint the space in tones ranging from yellow to red, in half-hour cycles, and two spotlights illuminate the sun directly, generating a reverie that takes the visitor from a permanent sunrise to sunset in an infinite loop that plunges him into a sort of comfortable lethargy.
Going out into the forest and bathing in that light in the shade of the trees invites you to stay outside, like the large nine-meter-high neon that indicates the 'exit' floating next to the entrance -a veiled homage to the neon palm tree of Gutiérrez Soto's Casablanca club-.
At the end of the fair, the birch trees will be replanted in a new location. They will return to the outside, thus ensuring that the waste left by the construction of the pavilion and its ecological footprint will be minimal, the birch forest will have the capacity to continue to develop beyond this ephemeral meeting.
“SALIDA” is an exterior design work that creates an atmosphere of being outside.
