Encore: on practising in times of collapse.
Carmen Salas
objet a is a studio led by Naiara Albizua and Carmen Salas, both graduated in Architecture from ETSAB (Barcelona) in 2021. They began their practice together as curators of the II Young Architecture Biennial of Catalonia, exploring the present's challenges as engines of change and opportunities for other futures.
That same spirit now runs through their studio: a practice that moves curatorial work, cultural production, and architecture. They have developed cultural projects with institutions such as the Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC) and MACBA, developing projects at the intersection of culture and the built environment. Driven by curiosity, their practice is committed to broadening the limits of the discipline and questioning the role architecture plays today.
We live in a moment of intertwined crises —climate, social, economic— so prolonged that the prospect of collapse no longer feels exceptional but ordinary. Yet what if collapse is not something we await, but the condition we already inhabit? Not a singular event, but an atmosphere that has quietly dissolved the promise of continuous progress.
Encore: on practising in times of collapse is an investigation that unfolds through three movements:
The first examines the exhaustion of modern paradigms through their material and symbolic ruins: architectures built on ideas of permanence that now persist as remnants of exhausted models, alongside the landscapes and infrastructures they have left behind.
The second asks what architecture becomes once construction is no longer the default response. Post-extractivist practices, retreat, reuse and non-construction shift the discipline from producing the new to working with what already exists, the landscapes, infrastructures and materials already in place.
The third explores the possibilities that emerge from this shift. It approaches the end of old models as an opening for speculative architecture, fiction and design to imagine other ways of inhabiting the world. It pictures these futures as plural ones shaped collectively, making space for voices, realities and forms of practice excluded by previous paradigms.
Bringing together essays, case studies and invited contributions, the project treats today's crises not as endings to mourn but as conditions to work from. Ruins become the ground from which other architectural imaginaries can arise.