{"id":899793,"date":"2026-09-21T06:54:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T06:54:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/899793\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T06:54:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T06:54:15","slug":"shakira-builds-her-own-town-in-madrid-with-big-designed-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/899793\/","title":{"rendered":"shakira builds her own town in madrid with BIG-designed park"},"content":{"rendered":"

SHAKIRA BUILDS HER OWN MACONDO IN MADRID<\/p>\n

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Why settle for a stadium when you can build a town? For her Madrid<\/a> residency, Shakira has taken over the 185,000-square-meter Iberdrola Music venue in Villaverde, transforming it into Macondo Park, a temporary cultural landscape designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)<\/a>. Conceived as an alternative to the conventional concert arena, the site combines a stadium for more than 50,000 spectators with colorful pavilions<\/a>, markets, food, art, fashion, cinema, and children\u2019s spaces \u2014 an entire world constructed around the shows rather than merely behind the stage.<\/p>\n

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Unlike an existing stadium<\/a>, where attention converges on a single performance, the purpose-built<\/a> environment allowed the architects to choreograph the audience\u2019s full journey. \u2018The architecture is designed to not only accommodate large crowds, but also to guide people, create moments of discovery, and offer places to gather, celebrate, and find shade throughout the day,\u2019 Stefani Fachini de Araujo, Associate at BIG and Design Lead on the project, tells designboom. Shakira may remain the main attraction, but the celebration is deliberately set in motion well before she appears.<\/p>\n

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colorful paths unfold across the temporary venue | all images courtesy of BIG<\/a><\/p>\n

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COLOR-CODED PATHS LEAD THROUGH A TEMPORARY TOWN<\/p>\n

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Visitors enter through a sequence of Es Latina welcoming arches, each assigned its own color and connected to a matching route across the site. The paths lead toward 12 temporary pavilions and complementary fan, VIP, and children\u2019s areas, with eight of the main structures dedicated to pillars of Latin American culture. \u2018Each path leads visitors to a different pavilion containing a unique experience,\u2019 explains Fachini de Araujo from BIG<\/a>. At the center stands the Macondo Tree, a shared landmark that gives this otherwise vast event ground something resembling a town square.<\/p>\n

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More than 500 trees and planted islands draw from Mediterranean, Spanish, and Latin American landscapes, reducing the scale of the open venue and adding pockets of shade. \u2018Along the way, more than 500 trees bring human scale to the site, turning a vast event ground into a park,\u2019 the Design Lead continues. The fictional town of Macondo, borrowed from Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s One Hundred Years of Solitude, becomes less a literal reconstruction than a spatial framework for mixing storytelling, popular culture, and collective celebration \u2014 with a little stadium logistics tucked underneath.<\/p>\n

\"BIG
BIG designs macondo park for shakira\u2019s madrid residency<\/p>\n

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BIG DESIGNS EVERY ELEMENT FOR A SECOND LIFE<\/p>\n

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Building this temporary universe meant working against both scale and time. According to Fachini de Araujo, the design process took around six months, while some of the pavilions were assembled in roughly ten days. \u2018This led us to work with the components found at any large event, such as trusses, scaffolding, containers, and stage ground support systems, and to rethink how they come together,\u2019 she shares. Wrapped in brightly colored fabric, the familiar event infrastructure becomes a family of shaded structures, each with a distinct identity but a deliberately pragmatic skeleton.<\/p>\n

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The temporary nature of Macondo Park also informed what happens after the final concert. \u2018Knowing from the start that it would be dismantled, we chose every element with its next life in mind,\u2019 Fachini de Araujo tells designboom. The structures and fabrics are intended for reuse, the artificial grass can be relocated to schools and playgrounds, and the trees will return to the nursery. For a project designed around spectacle, its disappearing act has been considered surprisingly carefully.<\/p>\n

\"BIG
colorful paths unfold across the temporary venue<\/p>\n

\"BIG
macondo park accommodates over 50,000 visitors<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SHAKIRA BUILDS HER OWN MACONDO IN MADRID \u00a0 Why settle for a stadium when you can build a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":899794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[4724,449,458,459,64,63,53929,460,134,92018,29063],"class_list":["post-899793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-architecture-in-spain","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bjarke-ingels-group-big","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-set-design","tag-temporary-pavilions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/899794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}