“Une ville dessinee” by Sergei Tchoban

It highlights the artist’s attachment to architectural drawings that combine European city structures and futuristic elements. Considered in interaction and in correlation with the urban fabric already in place, its different architectural expressions take into account the context and the physical and historical conditions of each site. (more…)

“OVO Grąbczewscy. Playing Architecture” at BDA Galerie Berlin © OVO Grąbczewscy

In order to retain the creative freedom necessary for their profession, the architects have developed the thesis of “playing architecture”. This enables them – despite stringent conditions – to apply their vision, research, and sense of freedom, fun, and humor as they see fit. (more…)

“Alvaro Urbano: The Awakening” at La Casa Encendida

Like a strange dream that seems to go on forever, The Awakening reanimates a building whose life appears to have expired long ago. Through an immersive installation comprised of fragments that make up the body of a building, a forgotten edifice is reactivated to provoke speculative thought about its past and future.

“Alvaro Urbano: The Awakening”
28 February – 19 April, 2020
La Casa Encendida
Ronda de Valencia, 2,  Madrid
Spain

In this exhibition in one scene, artist Alvaro Urbano (Madrid, 1983) uses as a case study the celebrated Hexagon Pavilion, designed by architects José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún. The building, now languishing in a ruinous state in Madrid’s Casa de Campo park, was first presented as the Spanish Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and is considered an important example of modern Spanish architecture. After years of abandonment, it is hard to believe what it once was and what it contained.

“Alvaro Urbano: The Awakening” at La Casa Encendida

Here—where the architecture and vegetation seem to be frozen in time, where the building itself holds a pictorial and sonic landscape that speaks of the past experiences lived within its walls, and where a pair of raccoons intermittently dwells—an endless twilight bathes the space in color and brings it to life.

Like an unscripted film that captures daily existence, The Awakening constructs a parallel life for an exhausted building in order to revive seemingly dormant histories.

Alvaro Urbano (Spain, 1983) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Madrid (ETSAM) and the Institut für Raumexperimente of the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He is currently a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2014 Urbano received the Villa Romana Prize. His work has been shown in different institutions and organizations such as Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York (upcoming); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Art Basel Statements with ChertLüdde; among many others.

José Esparza Chong Cuy (Mexico, 1984) is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City. Previously, he was the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA). He is co-curator of the ongoing traveling retrospective Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat, co-organized between the MCA, the Museu de arte de São Paulo, and the Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Prior to the MCA, Esparza Chong Cuy was Associate Curator at the Museo Jumex. Between 2007-2012 he lived in New York City and held positions as Curatorial Associate at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Research Fellow at the New Museum, and Contributing Editor at Domus magazine. In 2013 he was Co-Curator of the Lisbon Architecture Triennal. He is a graduate of Columbia University’s M.S. in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture.

“Retail Apocaypse” at ETH Zurich © Nelly Rodriguez

The research for the exhibition was prompted by the realization that “shopping” is history—that it is not merely a practice that can be historicized (for what practice cannot?), but that the physical, commercial, and social practices that converged to make it a unified field have now parted company, perhaps irreversibly. (more…)

Madrid Design Festival

It is a company owned by the Huarte family born in 1958 that stood out for its creativity in the art of furniture. In 1956, the construction company Huarte y Cía had to design the furniture of the Pavilion of Spain of the Universal Exhibition of Brussels of 1958. Designed by José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún, it was one of the first installations carried out by the incipient H Muebles that would arise a little later, when Juan Huarte chose this field. (more…)

Israels Plads, Photo: Rasmus Hjortshøj – COAST, COBE and Sweco Architects

The Danish firm Cobe is currently one of the most renowned protagonists of a new generation of architects. Using innovative methods, the team led by Dan Stubbergaard explores diverse potentials of the urban and promotes them through remarkable projects. Cobe sees the city as an extended living room, in which private and public spaces can be connected in experimental ways – making liveability a central theme of their work. (more…)

Studio Celine Baumann, Parliament of Plants © Studio Celine Baumann

The city is the place where our collective imaginaries born, where the narratives we have fixed in our minds and that guide our behaviours are created; where social relationships are produced and they produce space and place, dreams and fables, memories and desires, nightmares and dread, as well. (more…)

“Path to Heaven” at Fundació Enric Miralles

Through the act, the line and the drawing as the same language, this installation analyses and redefines the relationship between the hand and the brain: with the drawing as the meeting point, either in the human or in the robotic form. (more…)

MÏsto na viaduktÏ_2018, foto-Nikoleta_Slováková

The exhibition at DOX Centre presents the results of the Galegion research using several projects of Utopian cities. One of these “composite cities” has also inspired the title of the exhibition. Galegion combines a film archive, museum and gallery. The word galegion, which integrates the three meanings, has been coined by mathematician and theorist Ivan M. Havel. (more…)

Stadium de Vitrolles © Philippe Ruault

arc en rêve architecture center presents from March 12 to April 19, 2020, the exhibition Le Stadium, Rudy Ricciotti dedicated to the Stadium of Vitrolles, emblematic building of the architect Rudy Ricciotti, closed and abandoned by the municipality after the victory of the Front national election in Vitrolles in 1998. Labeled Remarkable Contemporary Architecture by the Ministry of Culture in 2018, the Stadium, designed in 1990, is a concert hall with 5,000 seats (for concerts and also sports – handball). The project, located on an old bauxite landfill, gives rise to a monumental building, a monolith of black concrete on a background of red mistral. (more…)