OB Space [NEMO] / Maca X + Conjuntos Empáticos

Architects: Maca X + Conjuntos Empáticos (Sálvora Feliz)
Year: 2025
Photography: Conjuntos Empáticos
Project Team: Zuelly Ucañay, María Paula Romero, Luisa Camelo, Victoria Insana, Gonzalo de Manuel, Alberto Ferrero, Kseniia Surmina, Nuria Guillén, Lide Arzamendi, Gabriel Silvelo, Xi Chen, Xinyi Li, Shiqiao Wang, Jiaming Chen
Developed as part of the Global Maca Project, coordinated by: Rodrigo Delso, Alberto García, Enrique Villamuelas
Venue: Festival Observatorio
Location: Balboa (El Bierzo), León
Country: Spain

OB Space [NEMO], created for Festival Observatorio in Balboa, León, is a temporary installation by Maca X and Conjuntos Empáticos. Conceived as both a capsule and a gathering space, the project offers a hybrid environment that merges natural surroundings with technological presence. The pneumatic, translucent structure is sheathed in reflective scales that shield its interior from summer heat, producing a refreshing microclimate. Beyond its climatic role, the scales introduce movement and changing patterns of light, giving the installation a living, adaptive character. Designed to be demountable, transportable, and lightweight, OB Space [NEMO] demonstrates how architecture can respond to contexts of impermanence, collective use, and environmental urgency. The project functions as a shared refuge, inviting visitors to rest, converse, and listen to RadioScopio, the festival’s experimental radio program. Positioned at the intersection of leisure and mediation, OB Space [NEMO] embodies a vision of architecture that resists permanence, prioritizing adaptability and minimal impact.

Ob space [nemo] / maca x + conjuntos empáticos

Rather than presenting itself as a finished object, OB Space [NEMO] frames architecture as an event. Its presence at Festival Observatorio is marked not by monumentality but by its capacity to host encounters, producing a situation where sound, shade, and human presence converge. Set within the esplanade among bushwood and ambient sounds, the project does not compete with its surroundings; it adapts to them, offering a momentary pause between nature and technology.

The design responds to the intensity of the summer climate with an envelope of reflective scales, which deflect solar radiation while generating a gentle play of light and shadow. This protective layer creates a fresh and habitable atmosphere, reducing thermal impact without energy-intensive systems. The pneumatic body of the installation minimizes ground impact, requiring no heavy machinery for assembly, reinforcing its ethos of lightness and mobility.

The nomadic character of OB Space [NEMO] positions it as an alternative to fixed architecture, a reminder that structures need not aspire to permanence to be meaningful. Its capacity to fold away, relocate, or vanish underscores an architecture of transition, suited to festivals, collective gatherings, and contexts of climatic uncertainty. In this way, the installation acts less as an object of display than as a facilitator of shared experiences, listening to radio transmissions, resting in the shade, or exchanging conversation.

By resisting prescriptive functionality, the project operates simultaneously as a living room, a capsule, a refuge, and a stage. The installation suggests a critical reflection on domesticity in contemporary times, asking how we might dwell lightly in the world while remaining in contact with it. Architecture here becomes comparable to a living organism, reflective and adaptive, as transient as the events it hosts.

OB Space [NEMO] ultimately imagines a future in which architecture is understood less as permanence and more as mediation, a space of respite and interaction. It is a proposal that dissolves the boundaries between nature and artifice, shelter and performance, presence and disappearance, leaving behind not structures, but moments.