Pedro Pitarch Architectures & Urbanisms, a Madrid-based architecture office, has recently designed a project for the Special 40th Anniversary Section of the ARCO Fair called "ARCO 40+1." This exhibition space commemorates 40+1 years of the art fair. The exhibition, where nineteen galleries present their works, was curated by María Inés Rodríguez, Sergio Rubira, and Francesco Stocchi.
From the project description. The ARCO 40+1 section is conceived as an imaginary museum—an intervention that inverts the spatial logic of art fairs.
Unlike a traditional layout, where each gallery space is typically perceived as an exterior accessible from a hallway, the 40+1 section is conceived as a purely interior experience—a sequence of interconnected rooms that bring a museum context to the fair.
The entire interior is content. Each gallery has an identical space, yet adapted to the requirements of the exhibited pieces. Almost as if walking through the rooms of a museum, the section dispenses with circulation spaces, allowing visitors to drift from one room to the next.
This migration from fair architecture to museum architecture is intensified by a change in the pace of circulation. To achieve this, the project's grid layout is rotated 9°, breaking the orthogonality of the rest of the fair's pathways and slowing down the flow of visitors.
It is precisely this gesture—rotating the grid—that generates an unexpected architectural element: an outer skin functioning as an archive, a leftover space between the grid and the perimeter. This thick, programmed skin expands not only to support the historical archive of the 40th anniversary but also to incorporate architectural content: a workspace, a screening room, a meeting area, and the ARCO periodical library.
Finally, the section is split in two by the fair's central aisle, which dramatically cuts through the grid and introduces visitors directly into this museum-like interior. The 40+1 section project has no architectural elevation, because its elevation is precisely its content: the works exhibited by gallerists and artists, as well as the forty-year history of the fair itself.
About the author. Pedro Pitarch is an architect (ETSAM, UPM) and musician (COM Cáceres). He has been a Steedman Fellow in Architecture (Washington University in St. Louis, USA, 2017), received the Extraordinary Graduation Award from ETSAM (UPM, 2014), the Archiprix International (Hunter Douglas Award 2015), and the Superscape - Future Urban Living Award (Vienna, Austria 2016). He is an associate professor of Architectural Design at ETSAM-UPM and has taught design at the Bartlett School of Architecture (Teaching Fellow in Architectural Design, University College London). In 2015, he founded ‘Pedro Pitarch Architectures & Urbanisms’, a Madrid-based architecture office. His professional practice operates at a tangent to architecture, researching the relationships between contemporary cultural production and the construction of societies.
Credits:
Project Title: ARCO 40+1
Subtitle: Special 40th Anniversary Section of the ‘ARCO Madrid’ Fair
Date: February 2022
Location: IFEMA, Madrid
Curators: María Inés Rodríguez, Sergio Rubira, and Francesco Stocchi
Architecture: Pedro Pitarch - Architectures & Urbanisms
This article was written by Elías Barczuk Pasamán. The translation is powered by AI.
