The brief
One of Ireland's leading creative agencies came to us with a brief from one of their global brand clients — a high-impact arrival experience for a major activation, held inside a Barcelona hotel ballroom over the course of a single event week. Brand and agency under NDA. The challenge sat in the engineering.
The space couldn't be touched. No drilling, no fixings, no anchors into the venue's walls, floors or ceilings — the entire structure had to be free-standing, self-supporting and lifted in clean at the end of the run. And the format the agency wanted wasn't a backdrop or a riser. It was a fully traversable tunnel of illuminated arches, finished to the standard the brand demands, ready for guests to walk through on arrival.
We engineered the tunnel as a modular MDF system, each arch designed to be cut, finished and shipped as a discrete piece, then bolted together on site. Fire-rated lycra fabric tensioned over each arch served as the diffuser. Five hundred metres of DMX-controlled LED were threaded behind the fabric — every arch addressable, every metre of light programmable to the activation's choreography.
Concept to install was measured in days, not weeks. The brand walked through it on the opening night exactly as the renders had promised.
Fully self-standing structure. Zero anchors, zero drilling, zero impact on the venue.
Every arch individually addressable. Programmed to brand choreography per cue.
Fire-rated fabric tensioned over modular MDF — interior-grade, risk-assessment compliant.
Designed in pieces. Bolted on site in record time. Struck clean at the end of the run.
How we built it
When the agency briefed us, the timeline was already short and the constraints were already non-negotiable. We design-built backwards from the install window — every choice of material, joinery method and lighting integration optimised to assemble fast, perform without compromise, and leave nothing behind.
When a Dublin agency calls Barcelona on a short timeline, with a global client in the brief and zero margin for a structural failure, the only correct answer is to build it as if it were a small piece of architecture — engineering first, materials second, time last. The fastest builds are the ones designed properly.
Eric Pastor
Creative Director, Sugar for Events