(RE) Envisioning: Turning a Madrid Office Tower into a Hybrid E-Sports Arena by 2050

What happens when remote work empties the corporate towers that once defined a city's skyline? One answer: you fill them with e-sports arenas, zen housing pods, and immersive gaming simulators wrapped in a phosphorescent skin. (RE) Envisioning takes Sáenz de Oiza's Castellana 81 tower in Madrid's business district and proposes its wholesale reinvention as a vertical cultural machine, one that treats architecture not as a static shell but as a responsive framework calibrated to the rituals of a digital society projected forward to 2050.

The project is the work of Belén Garrido and Pelayo López Suárez-Valdivieso, and it earned the People's Choice Award in The Digital Colosseum 2020 competition. Rather than drafting a new building from scratch, the designers chose to confront the harder question: how do you inject meaning, function, and spectacle into infrastructure the market has already discarded?

An Atrium Rebuilt Around Biophilia and Compact Living

The tower's interior is reorganized around an atrium that reads like a vertical garden crossed with a capsule hotel. Curved white pods, stacked and offset along the atrium walls, house minimalist living units designed for mental well-being over square footage. Between them, hanging planters and grass patches soften the geometry, while translucent purple glass spheres punctuate the section with color. Silhouetted figures move across the green patches at ground level, suggesting a pace of life closer to a park than a lobby. Shared facilities, including lounges, gyms, and leisure zones, orbit these pods, prioritizing communal life and digital lifestyles over the privatized floor plates of the original office program.

A Glowing Crown: The Rooftop E-Sports Stadium

The most dramatic intervention sits at the tower's summit. A circular e-sports arena hovers above the existing structure, enclosed in a dynamic envelope of phosphorescent tubes and glass that turns the building into a glowing landmark on Madrid's skyline after dark. The wireframe elevation drawing reveals the relationship between the arena's hovering disc and the tower below: a crowd gathers at the base, drawn to the spectacle overhead. At night, the structure reads as a multicolored beacon, its terraced lower levels illuminated in warm gradients while the roof assembly shifts between hues. It is digital culture made architectural, a stadium that performs for the city even when no match is underway.

Circular Portals and Neon Corridors: Designing for Immersion

Inside the tower, the simulator and MUGA (Multi-Use Gaming Area) levels abandon right angles entirely. Corridors are lined with circular portals outlined in neon, their reflective flooring doubling the light into infinity. Two figures walk through these curved openings, scaled to feel like thresholds between realities rather than simple doorways. Elsewhere, a curving interior space with pink illuminated screen alcoves and concentric ceiling lights suggests a room that can toggle between individual use and collective gathering. These advanced immersive environments are designed so users can enter alternate realities for gaming or learning, with the architecture itself performing the role of interface.

The flexibility matters. The MUGA concept allows spaces to adapt to both individuals and communities, compressing and expanding their function as demand shifts. It is a direct architectural response to the unpredictability of digital culture, where a room might host a solo VR session at noon and a 200-person tournament by evening.

Why This Project Matters

Cities are already grappling with the fallout of remote work: empty office towers, declining commercial tax bases, stranded infrastructure. (RE) Envisioning argues that demolition is not the only, or even the best, answer. By treating a specific building with a specific structural history as the starting point for speculation, Garrido and López Suárez-Valdivieso ground their futurism in something real. The proposal is more credible for it.

What makes the project resonate beyond its competition context is its willingness to take e-sports and gamification seriously as architectural programs. These are not novelty additions bolted onto a conventional mixed-use scheme. They are the organizing logic of the entire building, from the portal corridors to the rooftop stadium. As virtual spaces become normalized parts of daily life, architecture will need new typologies to house them. (RE) Envisioning offers an early, vivid sketch of what those typologies might look like.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Belén Garrido, Pelayo López Suárez-Valdivieso

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Project credits: (RE) Envisioning by Belén Garrido, Pelayo López Suárez-Valdivieso The Digital Colosseum 2020 (uni.xyz).