We have received a special jury mention at the San Fernando (Cádiz) venue of TAC! Festival 2024, the third edition of this ephemeral pavilion competition, with our proposal "Un montón de sal, una pared inclinada" (A Mound of Salt, a Leaning Wall).
The decision, driven by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda and the Arquia Foundation, recognized our project alongside two other proposals — “El Peso del Aire” and “El Jardín de las Delicias” — within this year’s competition, held in Vigo and San Fernando under the theme of public space design and the regeneration of urban centers. It’s a recognition we particularly value, as it grew out of an intuition we wanted to test: that the productive landscape of a place can become architectural matter with almost no transformation at all.
Salt as Heritage and as a Building Material
The project is sited in Plaza del Rey in San Fernando, at the heart of the Bay of Cádiz, home to a millennia-old salt-making tradition predating the Romans, which by the late 19th century exported 300,000 tonnes of salt a year. Faced with the industry’s decline in recent decades, we wanted to place salt at the very center of the city as living heritage, recognizing at the same time its environmental value for the bay’s biodiversity and its artisanal character.
The proposal is organized around a 5.5-meter-high mound of salt weighing 130 tonnes, which acts as the gravitational counterweight to a 70-degree leaning timber wall, 30 meters long and 11 meters tall. The wall’s stability depends entirely on this mass of salt, with no additional foundation required — respecting the recently renovated square and allowing the installation to be dismantled without leaving any trace on the ground. The wall faces the direction of the sun at its highest point in San Fernando, casting a shifting shadow that covers between 400 and 600 m² of public space over the three weeks in September and October that the festival runs.
Circular Economy and Local Collaboration
All the salt used comes from Salina Molino de Ossio, located just 9 km from the site, which acts as a local sponsor and recovers the material once the festival ends. The timber, in turn, evokes the traditional tools historically used to harvest salt: prefabricated trusses clad in plywood panels, designed to be assembled and disassembled efficiently on site. Both the salt and the timber are reusable once the installation comes down, with minimal environmental impact.
The shadow cast by the wall is large enough to host public events for up to 150 people. We proposed three distinct cultural programs throughout the day, each tied to San Fernando’s local identity: talks on the salt flats — with salina owners, biologists, and tourism representatives —, a restaurant serving despesque and salt-related produce, and flamenco concerts, each with a different seating configuration responding to the movement of the sun and its shadow over the course of the day.
About TAC! Festival 2024
TAC! Festival is an annual competition that promotes innovation and experimentation in architecture through the construction of temporary pavilions in different Spanish cities. The 2024 edition ran from June 13 to October 14 in Vigo and San Fernando, with the collaboration of the Concello de Vigo, the Ayuntamiento de San Fernando, and the support of the Galician Association of Architects (COAG).
With this mention, we add a new project to a line of work we’re keen to keep exploring: reading the material and productive identity of a place and returning it, transformed, as temporary public architecture.
More information on the winning projects of TAC! Festival 2024: tacfestival.com/ganadores-2024