TAC! Festival 2026. ESBIO

Manifesto for a situated architecture

ESBIO is both a pavilion and a disciplinary position. Against an autonomous and replicable architecture, capable of being deployed indiscriminately anywhere, the project proposes a situated architecture: an artefact that makes visible the material, urban, social, energetic and cultural conditions that shape it.

The name ESBIO, the commercial code of the Port of Sestao within the international logistics network, does not refer to “bio” as a label, but to a precise location within a global system of exchange. From this condition, the pavilion is conceived through the relationships already present in its surroundings.

Located at the entrance to Sestao’s Blast Furnace No. 1, ESBIO transforms a point of interruption along the promenade into a threshold between the city, the landscape and the industrial structure. The project does not begin with an autonomous form, but with a reading of the site: the blast furnace, port infrastructures, industrial roofs, steel coils and spontaneous vegetation are understood as active systems that shape the intervention.

The proposal is structured around four principles: the complexity of place, material circularity, visible energy and active vegetation. Industrial components and locally sourced materials reduce transportation and enable a construction based on dry assembly, conceived to be assembled, disassembled and reconfigured.

Energy becomes a spatial material. Light passes through the different layers of the system, creating shifting shadows, while water is channelled and the movement of meshes and lightweight elements makes the presence of air perceptible. At the same time, prototypes made from recycled polycarbonate incorporate local vegetation, flowers and spontaneous species, pressed and dried, functioning as light filters and materially connecting the pavilion with the post-industrial landscape.

ESBIO is not conceived as a finished object, but as an open, reversible and situated system. A lightweight and permeable structure that extends existing routes, brings different scales into proximity, and transforms the entrance to the Blast Furnace into a place for gathering and interaction.

Beyond a pavilion, ESBIO is a manifesto.