Interchange architectures around Paiosaco's fairground

The venture consists of proposing a new regenerating space that arises form a very complex reality: The Fair ground. Through a process of understanding the site, it’s about finding those elements that make this peculiar space, apparently chaotic and indifferent, special. To achieve this, it is needed to experience the scene, its times and transitions.

What would the evolution of a town like Paiosaco be like if each intervention had as guidelines the Architecture and its connection with the Landscape? Bearing this in mind, the Fairground is rethought: right now a space lacking in strength because all the interventions that has suffered, without a clear order. Most of its trees are broken or dry and have suffered extreme pruning, seeing its full potential cut off. The intervention consists of superimposing a new tree plantation on top of the existing structure, as negative of the current state. Following various guidelines, understanding the space as a place where many realities will meet; different densities are thus defined, capable of absorbing this complexity, creating a mesh that adapts to the temporal variations of Paiosaco, crossed by lines that look towards the rural, and a vertical element that becomes necessary as identity, the grain silos. This entire complex and its different spaces and materialities, gives the opportunity to purpose a broad and ambitious program, which apart from production and economy – related to the fairground – would be focused on learning: a Center for Crafts and Landscape, a place where one can train, produce and sell working with what the site itself offers. The project is solved with the minimum elements, enhancing the existing ones: the industrial structure, its materials and its image. So the only new volume, where the exhibition and sales will take place, is a massive concrete line that rises on the ground, generating a continuously open door from the fairground. The gesture of raising the new volume reveals behind it the main entrance to the complex, a patio as heart of the center as transition, a metallic U shaped gangway that interconnects horizontally the three volumes, the silos, the sawmill naves and the expo. And the vertical connection in the silo towers through a single metal useful core in a light body that rises behind that concrete line, formed by a membrane of slats of wood that open as we go up, a successions of spaces that host the program, an ascension above the trees of the fairground until you glimpse the sea.