Kanye West turning a Tadao Ando Malibu beach house into a ruin, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi purchasing and re-selling the 1955 Richard Neutra-designed Brown-Sidney House, and fashion designer Marc Jacobs renovating a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house near New York City are just a few examples of pop stars' affair with historically significant architecture. Celebrities, like soccer players, form an elite group characterized by a high concentration of wealth and significant social status. They are not only buyers of high-end architecture as authored property and cultural capital, but also agents of its preservation and promotion. This year, we are seeing new examples of this agency at work from a more abstract yet also more popular perspective: from the stage design for Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance to a newly designed stadium for Shakira by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, architecture is used as a vehicle for promoting Latin American identity.
On Friday, March 27, Shakira announced through her social media a project exclusively designed to host the final leg of her year-long Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, the project combines a performance space, park, markets, and a children's zone for over 50,000 fans. According to the architectural firm, the aim is to create an entertainment venue that extends beyond the concert moment, remaining active through a broad range of daily activities, similar to an amusement park for all audiences. The venue is expected to be open continuously from noon until midnight on each event day, offering live music by other artists alongside art, fashion, film, food, and various cultural events. Across the 21-hectare site, visitors will be invited to follow curvilinear paths draped in recycled fabrics through layered public spaces, including artisan markets, culinary experiences, and children's zones.
The Shakira Stadium project, set on the site of the existing Iberdrola Music venue, is the centerpiece of this multi-activity destination called "Macondo Park." Macondo is the fictional town and primary setting of Gabriel García Márquez's novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), a landmark work of Latin American magical realism. This tropical environment, where reality and fantasy coexist within the realm of normality, is believed to be inspired by the town of Aracataca in Colombia's Caribbean region, not far from Barranquilla, Shakira's hometown. In the vision proposed by BIG, Latin American and Spanish landscapes are reflected in the design's "green islands," which surround the stadium and transform it into "an immersive expression of contemporary Latin identity."
This representation is conveyed through multiple aspects of the project. While the artist's representatives have described the concerts as "an immersive experience in the world of Shakira," they also announced a cultural program called ES LATINA featuring emerging artists, and emphasized the family-oriented nature of the venue. According to El País, the children's area will be called Macondito and curated by Shakira's children, Milan and Sasha, drawing inspiration from the imaginative world of Gabriel García Márquez. According to the artist's team, it will be "a space designed for play, curiosity, and discovery, centered around a fundamental idea: imagination belongs to humans."
These elements, immersion in a specific atmosphere and landscape, the embodiment of a collective and diverse Latin identity, and an emphasis on spaces for all ages, including children, can also be observed in Bad Bunny's Super Bowl stage set and performance in February 2026. One project stages Puerto Rico, a Spanish colony until its acquisition by the United States in 1898, while the other proposes a literary vision of Colombia, a Spanish colony until 1819. Both are self-contained spatial designs created specifically for concert settings and within the artists' current countries of residence. These projects can be interpreted as calls to assert identity in the face of discrimination within the current global context of migration crises and the rise of racism; as built reminders of enduring cultural identities historically marginalized by the Global North; or as the spatial commodification of social realities through stylized representations. In any case, they use architecture as a vehicle for identity and, by extension, as a means of potentially affirming local cultures through imagery.
Other recent news from Spain focuses on events accompanying Barcelona's designation as the UIA–UNESCO 2026 World Capital of Architecture. The UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 has unveiled a detailed thematic program and speakers list, while the final piece of the central tower of one of the city's most iconic landmarks, Gaudí's Sagrada Familia, has been installed. The Spanish festival Concéntrico has also announced the teams designing interventions for its upcoming edition in Logroño, including a project by recent Pritzker Prize laureate Smiljan Radić.
