Elisava participates with several proposals in the first edition of MODEL. Architecture Festival of Barcelona

Several Elisava projects are part of the first edition of the new MODEL. Barcelona Architectures Festival, which from May 5 to 15 will bring together ephemeral installations, augmented realities, debates, routes and more than a hundred activities.

The event, co-organized by the Barcelona City Council and the College of Architects of Catalonia (COAC), was born as the first major event of the UIA-Unesco World Architecture Capital of Barcelona and, under the leitmotiv Re-Crecer, intends to rethink how we want to imagine, build and inhabit the city of the future.

The event will take place on a seven-kilometer circuit that delimits the border between Ciutat Vella and Eixample, and will include 10 experimental physical and augmented reality installations in public space, popular meals, routes, workshops and debates in emblematic spaces of the city; a wide range of proposals aimed at all audiences that will invite us to rediscover the city and ourselves.

The festival will feature several proposals from students and teachers of Elisava:

Occupying the centre with the words (from May 5 to 15): temporary intervention in the Plaza Real designed by Elisava and that will turn this space into the center of debates around architecture, the city, design and society. Its aim is to generate optimal conditions in which both encounters and disagreements, both consensus and controversy can take place, always through words. For this reason, the fountain of the Three Graces in the Plaza Real will be covered, temporarily occupying the center of the square with a structure that encourages its appropriation by any citizen who wants to speak. Occupy the center with the word’ has both an infrastructural and symbolic meaning – it is a spatial system that facilitates debate by temporarily transforming the public space and, at the same time, it is a manifesto for an open city. Authors: Roger Paez (direction), Manuela Valtchanova, Albert Fuster, Toni Montes.

Presentation of results of the subject ‘Proyecto de Mención III’ of the Degree in Design of Elisava (Friday, May 6, from 8:30h to 13h, Plaza Real): individual and collective proposal of reflection and positioning on urban space, by 25 students. Faculty: Mar Gené, Rebeca Font, Celia Marín, Albert Fuster, Joaquim Matutano, Jordi de Gispert.

Trans-Narratives-Behaviours (May 9, from 9:30 am to 1 pm, Plaza Real): performative exploration of the relationship between the body and the environment by 40 students of the Degree in Design at Elisava. Faculty: Mònica Molins, Marina Castán, Albert Fuster, Sander Wassink.

Elisava also organizes two more parallel activities: On Friday 13 in the morning there will be a session “Water management in our cities, is it efficient?”, a visit to the rainwater collection and retention tank and the sewer network located below and around Joan Miró Park. The park will also be visited and the treatment of surface water will be explained.

The kick-off session of the Workshop 50LH Challenge by Elisava will take place in the afternoon, an exploratory seminar to understand that water is the world’s scarce essential resource, and that it is not easy to assimilate and understand how to operate it from different scales. Students will be invited to a dialogue on the notion of urban habitat, built environment and its relationship with the social, economic and environmental context.

Both sessions are organized from the new Master in Design for Resilience which will begin its first edition next September 2022.

All in all, the city of Barcelona will be for 10 days the venue for an international debate on public space, with more than 120 participants from all over the world, including architects, writers, philosophers, anthropologists and thinkers, who will help us to rethink the construction of the city.

This first edition of the festival has as artistic directors the architects Eva Franch i Gilabert and Beth Galí, and the cultural researcher José Luis de Vicente. The assisting curators of the project are Ethel Baraona (Llibres Model), Álex Giménez (Pensament Model), Núria Moliner, Eva Serrat and Francesc Pla (Instal-lacions).