The Palais de l’Air et de l’Espace (Palace of Air and Space) is Ricardo Porro’s first project after arriving in France in 1966, and the fruit of collaboration with the Polish architect André Mrowiec, whom Porro met in Cuba during a competition for a Monument in the Bay of Pigs. For this museum dedicated to aviation and the conquest of space, an immense exhibition hall had to offer visitors the spectacle of airplanes suspended in mid air. Porro decided to breathe the aerodynamic dimension of the project into the architecture itself: a gigantic metallic framework covering the entire space of the exhibition. Under the influence of constant currents of air flowing through it, it seem to come alive and expand, pulling along the entire lower part of the concrete building in its movement and giving the whole building the appearance of a living organism. The model for the project, through its powerful visual impact, looks like a pure variation on the theme of mobility.
