Eva Franch I. Gilabert is one of the three artistic directors of Model. Barcelona Architectures Festival, together with Beth Galí I. Camprubí and José Luis de Vicente. The first edition of a project that has taken the city of Barcelona as a place for experimentation and debate.
From the 5th to the 15th of May, they took the public space and transformed it into both a playground and platform for international voices, local architects, policymakers, politicians and citizens, to engage and discuss what the future of Barcelona and other cities could be.
ArchDaily took the opportunity to talk with Franch about what the inspiration behind the Model Festival was and what was behind the central theme of "Re-growth". You can review her full dialogue, below.
This festival was born out of a desire to position Barcelona in its path for the 2026 World Capital of Architecture and the Congress that will take place here in the city, and to understand that these festivals and events don't necessarily mean anything by themselves unless there is a continued conversation and discussion around important issues that the city wants to address.
This festival was born out of a series of conversations and debates with many of the institutions and organisations here in Barcelona that have taken over 5 years of organising, under the umbrella of the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, a series of events, projects and civic initiatives that are bringing the city together to discuss architecture. This year, with the birth of Model. Festival, we are trying to bring together a series of conflicts, propositions and difficult questions that we want to address.
The project started with a collective brainstorm. Then, we started to decide on a series of unresolved and unaddressed conflicts in the city that we believe architecture can participate either in the addressing, unveiling or resolution. Understanding how each one of those conflicts was able to actually build with each other and produce a new taxonomy of the conflicts of the city, helped us come up with 5 different themes. Those 5 somehow seem very obvious but they really help us to understand at which moment we find ourselves as architects operating within the city.
The first theme was Between Cultures. All cities are a place of collision and if you want engagement between different cultures, how do we do that in a way that is not just segregating and separating but in fact integrating and bringing different cultures together? What is the manifestation by which these cultures can engage in an exchange? How do we do that in a moment of hyperglobality but also hyper locality? And how can ideas of identity and at the same time generosity and the space of convergence coexist within the same space?
The second theme was Between Species. We know and have learnt over the last 3 years that we are of course not living alone. That kind of human-centric anthropocentric perspective and understanding of the world has been put into crisis for quite some time now but the pandemic really taught us that we can, need and must understand the planet as a space of engagement and entitlement between beings and humans as non-human. We identified that it was essential to understand how we build, design and inhabit the city and how we actually provide the space and design for each one of those different understandings.
The third theme was Between Classes. Probably one of the most unspoken topics in architecture has to do with privilege, wealth and between classes. For me, it is probably one of the most important elements that we have and that we can and should address not only because of the way in which we build cities but also because of the way we build institutions. The way in which we enable and empower different individuals to occupy certain positions of power. And so, how we revert, how we question and problematize some of those relationships have been essential for this first edition of Model.
The fourth theme was Between Generations. We have a tendency to think of the city in different age sectors and how we serve children, students, families and the elderly and those kinds of classifications are quite obvious but at the same time extremely problematic. We do need to think of a city that forces, allows, and catalyses the transferring of knowledge from those ones who actually have to spend a lot of time on this planet and have a lot of knowledge about practices and traditions and things that actually have already gone wrong. We also need to, at the same time, provide platforms for the youth to contribute with their radical ideas of innovation to the world in which we live. So between generations has also been one of those structuring things that we wanted to bring to the table.
The fifth and last theme was Between Materials. We have to think that architecture ultimately is a discipline that deals with matter, whatever that matter may be. All of these different ways of understanding matter, information and circulation of ideas takes form in a particular confined space. So Between Materials is a theme that helps us understand the kind of complex relationship between the material and the ways in which we understand the circularity and the questions around sustainability, material reuse and the way in which we can engage with the material world through different perspectives.
So each one of those themes tries to englobe many of the conflicts that we all collectively created and generated. Then of we started to think about what the position in which we find ourselves today as architects, but also as citizens, is and we wanted to find a theme for this inaugural edition that was helping us to ask the right questions but also to do that with a dose of radical optimism. While we have had on the one hand a lot of conversations about degrowth and the ways in which we need to start slowing down and consuming non or less and start with our thoughts and behaviours, on the other hand, we have people who still believe in the kind of neoliberal city of growth, development and extreme production. So how we reconcile those two with new values and principles is through the theme of regrowth. We have to grow because we keep on growing but we have to grow differently with new values.
The festival decided on 4 values that have been constant and applied throughout the festival and which we have communicated with everyone that has made this festival possible.
The first value was re-situate. We need to actually understand the festivals even if they only last one week, or in this case ten days. We operate on different temporal scales and we do need to understand the rights of future generations. Architecture is thought of as developing fast but it is in fact extremely slow and so we need to know the different temporalities on which we operate. So we ask everyone to have an understanding of what different speeds and temporalities we need to engage and frame as architects, to ensure that we have an understanding of the space, time and dimension over buildings and projects.
The second value that we wanted to bring to the table was the idea of re-locating. Nowadays, if we are doing a festival in Barcelona, we are actually doing it from Barcelona and we are trying to talk not only about this city but also learn from the city and many others. We want to, at the same time, talk about the different planetary issues that are part of our contemporary agenda. So things such as the different notions of scale from the microscopic elements that we have become so aware of over the last 2 years of the pandemic, but also to the macroscopic. If one wants a cosmic scale then we do need to engage through design and design processes. That is also something that we wanted to highlight in order to avoid the kind of local or regional thinking that might emerge when one is only able to think about the consequences of the project within a very limited context. We want to bring that kind of planetary consciousness into everything that this festival produces, that moulds us.
The third value was re-diversifying. I believe it's easy to understand that we need to think about gender, class, race and culture. How do we, however, become conscious of each one of those values? This value is about counting people and actually recognizing, identifying and being extremely conscious about each one of those constituencies and their privileges and historical burdens. It's about how we can in fact empower people to come through and across and ensure that we can enable some of the voices that have initially been hurt and are still being questioned, even if sometimes through invisible forms of bias.
The fourth and last of those values was re-using. Every single project that we have done for this festival has had as its central value the idea of reusing the materials and producing a circularity that enables us to actually do what we preach.
So, now that I have given a kind of theoretical framework to the festival and maybe in a very succinct way, I can tell you more about what we have done. We started Model. as a way of thinking about city models. Some of you who are of my generation or even older are very familiar with the term Barcelona Model but many others will not know what it is. In fact, it is interesting that the very name itself is a kind of word that embodies a city that was once characterised by its capacity to transform itself through the production of public space. A city that from a dictatorship onwards understood public space as a space to be reclaimed, to be effectively contested and occupied. At the same time, the hard blocks that the Barcelona of the Olympic era produced were something that was in fact imitated, that was taken as a model and implemented in many places around the world. There are incredible lessons to be learned from that model but we know today that there are in fact many things that need to be changed from that. We need to produce new models and we need them to be redefined, adapted and constantly changing because the world is changing. Because we are changing and because there are still many inequalities that we can fight. There are still a lot of things we need to change.
So choosing the name Model. was both a word that works in Catalan and in English. A word that allows us to look historically at something that the city has valued a lot and at the same time that has also been in crisis. It serves us to understand that we have to produce new models but no longer with the kind of perspective that is closed and isolated models, but models that need to be questioned, challenged and, of course, implemented differently in relation to the different needs and desires of different cities and contexts.
What has fascinated me about Model. is that as architects we also produce models. The idea has been a fantastic way to think of a name that over the years will hopefully take off and can help us understand what it is that anyone can find when they come to Barcelona, either as a participant or as a spectator, in a festival that aims to engage citizens, politicians, policymakers, architects, urban planners, activists with the same kind of proximity that we would do if we were simply doing a festival by architects for architects. This festival is from architecture for everyone else.
The festival brought back reflections on how we started to produce experimental architecture allowing people to start rediscovering and thinking about how they want to think about the city and how they want to build the city. We started by producing 5 installations in public space, each of them with one of the different themes of the festival. We produced 5 augmented reality installations, a series of debates and lectures and discussions in public institutions and in public spaces, and we also produced a series of exhibitions that invited architects to produce new imaginaries.
In fact, you are invited to review everything from drawings to augmented realities and installations. We have architects like MAIO who did the production of an urban kitchen in Plaza Catalunya with the theme of Between Cultures, where we cooked excellent meals with Cooking Sections that made us think about the importance of starting to eat in a way that really fights climate change. We also had "Aprofitem els Aliments", a platform that actually worked throughout the week taking food waste from supermarkets to cook a meal for the whole city giving us a very clear understanding of the material waste we produce even from the ways we eat and consume to survive. We believe that architecture is also food, that architecture is air, and that architecture is also the way we relate to information and politics. Many of these projects have really opened, in some cases literally and in others virtually, the doors and windows of the city of Barcelona.
One of the augmented realities developed by Farzin and Júlia has opened the doors to a much better understanding of the speculative processes that are taking place in the city of Barcelona and in any other city in the world by investment funds or different rental platforms. How do we really give citizens the ability to discover and understand what is happening around their cities? How we empower them to be able to see and then obviously act is probably one of the most important elements of this festival. How do we put things on the table, in the public debate, in the public sphere, and then empower citizens, politicians and architects to think and act differently?
Some of the installations we have made have literally put its citizens in places they have never been. One of these, in fact, has been a public platform in a part of the city that Antonio López occupied for many years. Someone who came from the aristocracy of power, money and capital, someone who really treated slavery as a form of extraction. His sculpture was torn down 3 years ago. The plain was left and what we have done is occupy that base. OJO studio has produced an installation that allows every citizen, group of friends and collectives to go there and discuss who should represent us and who really has a voice. How do we begin to question the structures that we sometimes take for granted, that even when they talk the talk of democracy they are not, and that are actually oppressing us rather than liberating us? I could probably talk for 3 more hours about the 100 projects we have done.
We have also presented a manifesto at the Design Hub and the Barcelona Protocol, that has been built by different speakers and voices collectively and that was a kind of pooling to try to understand what public is. We started talking about public space, then we moved on to public housing, public infrastructure, public visions, and we continued talking about public culture, public education and public futures. In addition, we opened an exhibition that has actually been co-organised with the Mies van der Rohe Foundation about projects that at some point dealt with these public elements and that have been finalists for the Mies Prize over the last 30 years, and that can give us an idea of how cities like Copenhagen or Barcelona have produced very innovative spaces through the work of architects over the last decades. We hope and expect that from the festival, everyone will continue to re-imagine how we want to live together and produce new spaces of innovation and radical practice.
I invite you all to visit the Model. Barcelona website and see you next year.
