The architectural project is rarely immaterial. The physical, economic and social context inexorably color building proposals. But in this case, it seems that everything is yet to be defined. The physical environment, the future peripheral economic center of Cáceres, must be imagined on the basis of urban plans and political projects, as it is currently an underdeveloped industrial wasteland. The final use of the building is also absent, since by definition a Trade Fair Building is available as a container and server of events unknown a priori.

Therefore, our proposal aims to generate a building suitable for the future situation of high use of the area, enabling the comfortable use of the building until that situation arises.

Due to the specific characteristics of the program to be tackled, our intervention is positioned as a generator of inertia in the area. It will not only be an activity attractor, but it will also define the character of the area towards commercial and R&D&I uses, marking the territory as an attractor of sustainable and clean activity.

The intervention is generated by the combination of two design strategies, one aimed at the qualification of the contact of the building with its surroundings, and the other at sheltering the programmatic pieces under a spatially and climatically controlled environment.

First of all, we choose to qualify the entire environment of the building through a change of elevation, which allows us to define a large depressed square on which not only the different building pieces requested are placed, but also provides a semi-public space for the expansion of the exhibition halls, allowing a gradual entrance to the building, as well as controlling the different possible extensions requested.

Secondly, we placed a large canopy over the exhibition rooms, as well as the smaller program pieces, giving character to the real façade of our intervention, the upper one. These clouds not only define a diffuse boundary between interior and exterior, but by touching the ground in their necessary search for stability, they qualify the large exhibition spaces, usually empty and lacking in personality, with courtyards of light, rest areas and installations.

Both operations mark with a unique character the proposed building, providing the necessary image that an intervention of these characteristics needs; not from the artificiality of the skin, but from the true architectural definition of the entire complex.