In our current cities, urban density and rising land values often force a choice between large-scale civic buildings and open public space. Traditionally, plazas have been treated as areas surrounding a building's footprint, but this strategy was modified when pilotis were introduced by the early 20th-century modernist movement. While the original intent was to create a sense of lightness that would allow circulation and light to flow beneath a structure, contemporary requirements for seismic loads, fire egress, and heavy occupancies render thin columns insufficient for the needs of current large-scale civic projects.

Facing Vannes train station, the project is part of the rehabilitation of a 19th-century industrial complex, composed of a house, a 44-meter-long hall, and a glass roof vestige of a winter garden. Long abandoned, the site was in a state of advanced decay.

At a moment when architecture is being pushed to respond more directly to environmental and social pressures, Spain's pavilion for World Design Capital Frankfurt Rhein-Main 2026 positions itself as more than a temporary installation. While materiality is at the center of its design, the project explores how a reversible cultural infrastructure can activate public space without permanent construction. Discussions about material use, circularity and reutilization in architecture are closely tied to cultural contexts, environmental conditions, and historical influences that reveal how time shapes the built environment. Beyond its construction, Spain's pavilion expresses identity by reinterpreting the architectural method of Antoni Gaudí, the creator of the Sagrada Familia and Park Güell. It also demonstrates how Spain's creative and industrial sectors address current challenges with innovative construction solutions.

Architecture has long been drawn upward. In Air and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard writes about an imagination shaped by movement; by the urge to rise, to drift, to escape the pull of the ground. Air, for him, invites imagination to distort, to invent, to go beyond what is given rather than simply reproduce it. In that sense, lightness is not only a physical condition, but a feeling: a desire to transcend the weight of the earth and move toward something less tangible. This impulse can be traced across architecture's enduring attempts to lift itself, from pilotis and long spans to suspended systems and tensile membranes. To build lightly, then, is not only a technical ambition, but also a cultural one – a way of reaching toward the sky.