Model. Barcelona Architectures Festival

This year, the Model. Barcelona Architectures Festival, the festival of experimental and visionary architecture in Barcelona, celebrates its second edition and is managed by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe.

From 20 to 30 April 2023, we will be able to enjoy this space for reflection and celebration that brings us closer to experimental architecture and invites us to rethink how we want to live together through new models of the city.

The second edition of Model, under the artistic direction of Eva Franch and Gilabert, takes up last year’s legacy and will present installations in public space, augmented realities, symposiums, workshops and experimental programmes, among others, which together will produce a space for exchange, learning and dissemination of ideas.

LINA fellows have been offered the opportunity to be part of the Fundació Mies van der Rohe program through conferences, workshops, mentoring or other collaborative formats, helping their ideas reach further and gain an international audience.

Collaboration with LINA fellows

The teams Palace of Un/Learning (Bernadette Krejs and Max Utech), “zwkr” (Kateřina Krupičková and Martin Zwahlen) and Space Saloon + The MAAK (Max Melvill, Rebecca van Beeck , Danny Wills and Gian Maria Socci) have been invited to participate in the framework of “Model. Barcelona Architectures Festival”.

Panots Carpet | Zwahlen Krupičková

26 April

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich are requested by the German government to design a pavilion for the Weimar Republic. For the opening of the German pavilion, a red carpet was rolled out for the honoured guest King Alfonso XII. The Panots Carpet project takes up this theme and places a new type of carpet on the square, and is a mixture of coverings that makes changes visible. The placement recalls the old gravel path leading toward the pavilion. 

In the beginning, it is a neatly patterned carpet inspired by the traditional paving “panots” that will blend over time. The shaped rectangle will blur over the months and expand laterally. The traces of people crossing the square become visible. After the rain, certain materials darken more than others. Water is stored in them and evaporation creates a natural cooling effect. Plants and insects are also welcome here. These nest in the joints and gaps and can multiply and thrive. This carpet is a place for everyone. It is composed of various natural materials that are locally available. They are by-products and waste products that will decompose through weathering.

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Palace of Un/Learning: Glitching Mies | Bernadette Krejs & Max Utech

27 April

Glitching Mies creates a dissident moment and a participatory action challenging the Barcelona Pavilion as one of the main references in the Modern architectural canon. The Pavilion is queered through questioning and transgressing its hegemonic principles of material, space and use.

As an undisputed reference, the pavilion represents the dominant narrative of the architectural canon: spaces emptied of any domesticity, framed by hard and prestigious materials and homogenous staged elements of objects, people and stories around it.

But every building narrative has its accidents, cracks and glitches that can unleash “phantomed stories” [Jaque, 2020]. Glitching Mies embraces these blurring moments of counter visibility through occupying and irritating the well-known spatial and visual setting of the Pavilion, by transitioning its materiality, its boundaries and hierarchies.

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