Geologics

The Universal and International Expositions, like the Olympics, are events that tend to be staged either in emerging countries that are consolidating a position in the international panorama primarily in political or economic terms, or in central locations engaged in reasserting their international leadership. Wroclaw, in the south of Poland, near the German border, belongs to the first category, as a place that is undergoing major political and economic transformation and hopes to attract the world’s attention with a great event. In this endeavour it is competing with Tangiers in Morocco and Yeosu in Korea to host the forthcoming Expo 201. In order to choose the master plan for the laying out of its Expo and a scheme for an emblematic building, the city organized an international competition, in which our proposal was selected for the design of the building.

An Expo is an event that has no real identity in its own right. This being so, the ones that have gone down in history are those that have been very clearly symbolized by a landmark building that has come to constitute an icon of the city, such as Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Atomium in Brussels or Buckminster Fuller’s Dome in Montreal.

To the south of the port is a rocky headland and a natural beach with the outfall of a surface water drainage system.

The intervention here is based on a new hexagonal pattern that operates by constructing multiple coastlines, both outside and inside the rocky zone, defined by different functions and materials.
A restaurant located between sea level and the upper part of the headland serves to reconstruct the original line of the coast at a resolution lower than the original.
The beach is ordered with a higher resolution (like the grains of its sand) by means of a great concrete boomerang with the drainage pipe routed beneath it, forming ‘a beach on top of the beach’.

An artificial wooden island, anchored off the beach in summer and stored next to the restaurant in winter, takes the system to its limit, permitting a dynamic transformation of the coastline.