CULTURAL STRUCTURE
Competition
June 2016
Cultural Structure is an architecture competition developed in June 2016. The project establishes a new ephemeral cultural grid to El Retiro park, which acts as a catalyst for the knowledge and the yearly main cultural event in Spain, Madrid book fair.
The proposal tries to reverse the current way the event takes place facing a simplistic understanding of the festival in a programmatic (the place where books are sold) and design level (set of booths arranged over a linear path). The project generates a structure that acts as a hub where the different agents, activities and relations are inserted. A structure where all the complex systems and interactions of Madrid book fair is fully developed seeking to strengthen and condensing it to maximize its diffusion abroad. The system aims to foster relations by fitting them into a rigid grid with diffuse boundaries to introduce outside nature.
Awards
-1st prize at a national competition developed by the city council of Madrid.
-Featured student project by Universidad Europea de Madrid.
Urban Strategy
The project understands El Retiro as a privileged area, and it should not be modified due to its characteristics and benefits to Madrid. The proposal relocates the book fair in the park’s outskirts to create a symbiosis of multiple activities and relations without modifying the existing conditions. Instead of a linear and disperse form, the proposal offers a compact and densified situation rearranging the books fair’s programs and spaces. Besides, existing conditions are analyzed via algorithms establishing different occupancy features wich merge and blur Madrid book fair and el Retiro Park into a single element.
Programmatic Rearrange Strategy
Studying Madrid book fair’s incomes and organisation, the project establishes a rearrange of the activity based on time and benefit requirements for each participant.
Modularity & Adaptability
The project conceives the architecture as a liveable actively changing structure instead of a permanent and immutable part of El Retiro. It can be rearranged and modified as requirements of different fairs or events that will take place in this great site of Madrid.
