Revisiting a project from 2003 in the year 2026 is not an exercise in nostalgia, but a necessary excavation of the origins of our current "media drift." I activate this piece now from a place of deep urban and technological friction—an era where the boundaries between the physical room and the digital broadcast have entirely dissolved. The "Disney Channel TV Set" project emerged during a pivotal moment when television began to consume its own temporal logic, demanding spaces that could keep pace with a frantic, non-stop programming cycle. It addresses the urgency of creating a stable architectural response to an inherently unstable medium. By looking back at this 15x15 meter void, we observe the birth of the "narrative container," a system designed to house the hyper-speed attention of a nascent digital generation. It is a social and conceptual artifact that marks the transition from static scenery to inhabitable, liquid environments. The core operational logic of this project rests on the concept of "The Fishbowl" (La Pecera). The device is a 15x15 meter inhabitable void where the traditional architectural hierarchy of four walls and a floor is dismantled. Instead, the team at TABLE engineered a continuous skin of interlocking folds and planes that behave as a singular, fluid surface. This material system allows for total 360º navigation, enabling cameras to move through the space without encountering the "backstage" or a dead end. The structure behaves as a functional loop: some elements remain in a state of relative quietude while others are in literal motion, entrelaced to configure a liquid geometry. The sequencing of the set—moving from oversized to miniaturized objects—destroys recognizable scale, turning the physical room into an abstract machine for play. It is a system of "appropriable structures" designed not just for viewing, but for the active choreography of moving, speaking, and interacting within a media-saturated vacuum.
To understand the weight of this set, we must frame it through a light conceptual scaffolding that connects architecture to the "unstable image." This project resonates with Paul Virilio’s concepts of "dromology" and the speed of light in tele-surveillance; the set is a physical response to the accelerated time of the screen. It also leans on Guy Debord’s "Society of the Spectacle," where the construction of the environment is inseparable from the production of the image. The fishbowl metaphor is crucial here: it allows the occupants to "be the fish and observe the fishbowl" simultaneously, creating a self-reflexive architecture that acknowledges its own condition as a bubble. This light theoretical frame situates the work within a broader technological question: how do we build for a world that no longer values permanence? By prioritizing "narrative quality" over fixed form, the project proposes a curatorial method where the space itself becomes a storyteller, open enough to allow for the surrealist "teller of tales" to occupy its folds. The trajectory of this work is one of constant mutation, moving from a rigid Madrid studio to a distributed media legacy. While the physical set was built for a specific time and network, its operational logic has drifted into the contemporary "online room." It mutates from a 360º physical stage into the immersive, hybrid environments we inhabit today in virtual and augmented realities. The project re-situates itself whenever a digital platform attempts to replicate a "total environment." We see it migrate from the architectural review (COAM) into the Promax awards, and finally into the "socioplastic" archives of 2026. It transforms from a static site of production into a portable logic of "narrative machines" that can be deployed in any territorial context. The set does not disappear; it folds into new formats, becoming a precursor to the "liquid architecture" that now defines our social media interfaces and distributed digital agencies. Rather than closing the book on this early experiment, we must ask: what future interventions are made possible by treating architecture as a "narrative void"? This work suggests a shift in method from the construction of objects to the curation of atmospheres. It opens the door to new configurations of "responsive environments" that can adapt to the frantic, fragmented attention of the future. The Fishbowl suggests that our future spaces should not be designed as final products, but as "appropriable structures" that remain in a state of perpetual rehearsal. It is a curatorial launchpad for exploring the friction between the physical body and the media bubble, asking us to reconsider how we inhabit the voids of our own imagination. As we move further into the 360º era, the lessons of this liquid set remain: the only way to survive the bubble is to learn how to navigate its skins.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2017/11/360-tv-set-zona-7-plato-disney-channel.html
