CONAMA Pavilion: A Living Example of Sustainable, Open, and Collaborative Design
The Madrid City Council participates annually in the National Environmental Congress (CONAMA), an event dedicated to promoting sustainable practices.
Zuloark collaborates each year with the City Council in designing its pavilion for the exhibition during the congress.
In our proposals, we reuse materials from municipal storage facilities, aligning with our Second Lives design philosophy. We believe that leveraging existing resources contributes to the pavilion’s sustainability and helps reduce the waste it generates.
The CONAMA 2022 pavilion is built using recycled wood from benches in the city of Madrid. This initiative traces its roots back to the “Herminio Operation” during CONAMA 2014, when we began collaborating with Herminio, the municipal storage official who preserves all the wood from Madrid’s unused benches.
In addition to giving a second life to waste materials, such as wood from benches, we also design the pavilion with its second life in mind. Instead of being dismantled at the end of the congress, the pavilion is always relocated to other areas of Madrid, such as, in this instance, the Retiro Urban Garden.
For this purpose, we designed a foldable structure with wheels, making it easily transportable and capable of being unfolded and reconfigured to suit various uses.
The pavilion thus takes on a second life as a Mobile Classroom, an educational and meeting space for the Environmental Education Department of the Madrid City Council.
This practice of reusing both materials and the pavilion itself is a consistent feature of every CONAMA edition. We make use of resources such as plants from the Municipal Nurseries of Retiro, compost from the Migas Calientes facility, and municipal transportation. In previous editions, the pavilion has found new homes in locations such as the Conde Duque Cultural Center, the Campo de Cebada, schools, and urban gardens.
Through the CONAMA pavilions, we aim for our commitment to sustainable design to inspire the efforts of local authorities, fostering the creation of meaningful spaces that benefit the community and promote environmental awareness.
