Castilla y León Pavilion (PCyL)
Expo Zaragoza 2008
Zaragoza 2008
The Castilla y León Pavilion at Expo Zaragoza 2008 emerged from a deliberate hybridization: the optimism and pragmatism of architecture merged with the collage principles of Nouveau Réalisme, in direct response to the Expo's theme, "Water and Sustainable Development."
Three curved walls face one another, built from reclaimed wood and empty wine bottles, lit from within by LED technology, and topped by a solid wood slab. The result is architecture that organizes experience through opposition—generating flows and pauses from contrasting spatial conditions.
The pavilion's logic finds an unexpected echo in the practice of Lara Almarcegui, herself born in Zaragoza, whose work has spent three decades quantifying and exposing the raw material substrate of the built environment — piling construction rubble into exhibition halls, cataloging wastelands, calculating the matter displaced by demolition. Both practices refuse to let material remain invisible: where Almarcegui's installations diagnose a building's material afterlife by returning it to its constituent mass, the pavilion works in reverse, assembling discarded matter into a functioning architecture that still declares its material origin. Hers is archival; the pavilion's is generative — proposing what discarded matter can still become.
The pavilion's aesthetic groundwork opens a dialogue between material and construction, accumulation and energy, space and the time of the ephemeral. Conceived as a temporary, nomadic structure — today surviving only as archive — it expresses, through contrasts, a shift in collective sensibility: neighborhood against mass, low-tech against high-tech, the tactile against the visual. It foregrounds the energetic effort embedded in matter, staging a permeability between the categories of engineer and bricoleur — pointing to the architect's responsibility to select, deliberately, a palette of materials that resists the default inertia of industrial production.
2008 Competition First Prize