The usual comparisons to make the dimensions of a space comprehensible use football fields or Olympic swimming pools. Then, we could talk about ten Olympic swimming pools or two football fields, but those responsible for the construction project of the new Fira de Barcelona pavilion prefer to use an even more gigantic comparison: an entire Eixample island, with a length of 110 meters on each side, with the interior, the main ones, the climbs... Absolutely everything that is on an Eixample block could be moved into the future pavilion, named Hall Zero, which will transform the Gran Via site de l'Hospitalet in one of the largest – as well as modern – in all of Europe.
The foundation works have already begun on a huge lot located around Plaça Europa that Porcelanosa had occupied in recent years. During the recent celebration of the Smart City Expo World Congress, you could hear the constant hum of the machines working, and it will also be like this at the next ISE audiovisual fair at the end of January and Mobile at the end of February, the two major professional congresses that they've pushed for expansion because they're already big, but they want to be even bigger in the future. With the added space, it is also expected to capture new events and congresses, as well as combine some of them, since the new pavilion is next to the other, but at the same time separate, which will allow celebrating very different things simultaneously
When the expansion becomes a reality, throughout 2026, Fira de Barcelona will add more than 60,000 square meters of exhibition space distributed over two floors to the 240,000 offered by the current eight pavilions, with which it will be connected by an elevated walkway. In addition, it will have a fourteen-storey office building that will be acquired by the Generalitat to move public workers there, as it already did in the administrative campus located just at the other end of the fairgrounds, on Paseo de la Zona Franca.
The architectural complex carries the firm of Toyo Ito and the architectural studio of Fermín Vázquez (b720), who have finally decided to concentrate the 24,000 m2 of office space in a single, larger and better used tower instead of two towers smaller than initially predicted. Fira 2000, as the promoter of the project, has also dispensed with the public space and the restaurant area on the upper terrace that had been considered at first and will limit access only to the workers assigned there, such as also to congressmen who go to the gigantic pavilion or the adjacent congress area.
What has not changed is the pavilion itself, which will have two floors and has been designed with a scale and size that make it one of the most unique fair spaces in the world, both in terms of the result and the way it was built . The purely diaphanous approach, without pillars, will mean that the roof is built with a spatial mesh that will rise above the structure, as the fellow Japanese Arata Isozaki did at the Palau Sant Jordi. This particularity makes it possible to resort to another complementary comparison to that of the Eixample: an airplane could enter the new pavilion perfectly thanks to the structure without pillars, as if it were a large hangar. Or Sant Jordi itself, whose dimensions are also smaller than the new space, called to be the jewel in the crown of Fira de Barcelona after an investment of 323 million euros, which will be borne by the different administrations involved.
The laying of the first stone yesterday was a sign of agreement and consensus vision of all. "It's not just the expansion of the site, it's the expansion of opportunities for the next generations of Catalans", assured the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, who headed the wide institutional representation of which the Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni; the mayoress of l'Hospitalet, Núria Marín; the president of the Provincial Council of Barcelona, Lluïsa Moret; the president of the Chamber, Josep Santacreu, and the president of Fira de Barcelona, Pau Relat. Everyone took a shovel to lay the first stone. The ISE audiovisual fair or Mobile, at the beginning of 2027, are expected to be the congresses that inaugurate the new space.
