espacioSOLO / estudio Herreros

Daniel Tapia

7 years ago

Architects: estudio Herreros
Location: Plaza de la Independencia, 5, 28001 Madrid, Spain
Author Architects: estudio Herreros, Juan Herreros – Jens Richter
Area: 1300.0 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Javier Callejas

Installations: Úrculo Ingenieros
Structure: Eduardo Barrón
Construction: Brunelar, S.L

Text description provided by the architects. espacioSOLO is the headquarters and archive of an art collection. It gives shelter to an artistic panorama linked to post-pop and post-street-art movements in all formats. It aims to bring artists closer to the people, to excite young people with the world of creativity, to stimulate a thousand conversations, and to explore new ways of looking and thinking. It is a place of work, an environment for the sheer pleasure of being lost in time, a multifunctional meeting point, and a scenario that allows people to connect and participate in multiple conversations.

The layout is organized into corridors that function as an urban system of streets and squares, invoking the context of urban art: grey concrete floors, walls of industrial cement panels and wood fiber have an impressive presence thanks to spectacular lighting. As in the city, these itineraries vary in width; from a narrow passage to an expanded plaza-like space where collective activity can be improvised.

The series of spaces includes austere, museum-like exhibition halls, furnished spaces that introduce a domestic content into the experience, storage spaces, technical spaces for management, and high-rise spaces capable of housing large-format works (such as a lobby that connects the space with the city) or the welcoming auditorium that ends the visit in an enveloping configuration. It makes the trajectory feel like a Möbius strip and invites visitors to return to the exhibition circuit. The overall experience is one of continuous movement as if the collection is in permanent transformation.