Located in the former Alpargatas factory in Barracas, Buenos Aires, this entrance hall for Casa FOA 2026 transforms an industrial building through a few precise operations, introducing a new continuous floor, integrated lighting and a mirrored ticket office.
RECIBIR
The project for the entrance hall of Casa FOA 2026 is located in Palacio Molina, the former Alpargatas factory in Barracas, Buenos Aires. The company was founded in 1885, and its first factory in Barracas was inaugurated in 1890.
The project begins with a simple decision: to intervene only where necessary.
Faced with an existing architecture of strong spatial and material character, the proposal avoids introducing a new protagonism and instead concentrates on a few precise operations that reinforce qualities already present in the building.
Architecture takes on the role of receiving. Rather than introducing conventional furniture, the architecture itself incorporates places to stop, wait and contemplate the work created especially for the space by artist Paola Vega. A continuous new floor organises circulation while providing different conditions for remaining in the hall. Waiting becomes a quality of the space rather than a function assigned to an object.
The ticket office is the only new volume introduced into the intervention. Positioned between the existing columns and carefully separated from them, it is discovered gradually along the route. Its mirrored envelope is not conceived as a formal statement, but as a way of reducing the presence of an unavoidable programme and allowing the existing architecture to remain the protagonist. Reaching its interior requires moving around the volume, making the encounter with the ticket office part of the experience of the hall.
The same approach guides the remaining interventions. The wooden floor recalls the material memory of the building’s former cobblestone surfaces. Lighting is integrated between the existing timber beams, becoming part of the architecture without altering its reading. The existing walls are preserved as faithfully as possible, with their materiality, textures and traces of time understood as part of the building’s identity.
A textile plane marks the transition towards the following exhibition space. Rather than simply separating two areas, it introduces a pause in the route and anticipates a new spatial experience.
Each decision responds to the same intention: to do only what is essential. Not to intervene less, but to intervene with precision. Rather than producing a new image, the proposal seeks to offer a new way of moving through, discovering and inhabiting Palacio Molina.
Not every intervention needs to create a new image. Some simply allow us to look at, and inhabit, the existing one more attentively.
Project team
Fernando Russi, Architect
Tomás Rowinski, Architect
Ramiro Hermida Torres, Architect
Juan Pablo Rios, Architect
Artist — Paola Vega — Galeria Calvaresi
Collaborators
MSH · Aluworks · Monolitic · IMDI · MTA — Martín Masciotra, lighting design · Cristal Diseño · Inox Atelier · Estudio Te ·
Nordbox · Textiles Tala · EXITO · Ufficio
Official sponsors
Patagonia · Macroled · Alba · Riel Americano · Placo · Nanda · Faplac · Atrim
