XVI Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism
Me—dio Pla—zo
Curators
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz and Ángel Martínez García-Posada
Design of the traveling exhibition
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz and Ángel Martínez García-Posada
Collaborators
Javier Rodríguez Ulibarri, Coordinación de la Bienal; Happening Estudio (Sara González), Graphic Design; Jaime Fernández y Cristóbal Galocha, architects in Sol89; No somos nada, audiovisual production; Nicholas Chandler, production of Cajas de tiempo; Museographia, installation of the exhibition; Daniel Natoli, audiovisual “5 Horizontes”; Javier Milara, audiovisual installation in Patio de Artillería
Collaborators at different locations
Zaragoza: Raimundo Bambó; A Coruña: Alberte Pérez; Palma de Mallorca: Pep Ripoll; Shanghái: Plácido González
Client
Ministerio de Transporte, Movilidad y Agenda Urbana. Con la colaboración del CSCAE y el apoyo de Fundación Arquia
Photograph
En Sevilla, Fernando Alda; en A Coruña, Iván Casal Nieto; En Shanghái, William Mulvihill y Plácido González
The current Biennial, Me—dio Pla—zo, refers to the convenience of architecture, in this present that has overcome various crisis situations, not only providing efficient responses to today’s needs but also exploring the concerns of tomorrow. In the last three lustros, a good portion of Spanish architectural production has been conditioned by the focused attention to the immediate circumstances of a context of continuous difficulty, which has defined the lineage of what has been thought and built in these years. This may have influenced a partial renunciation of a broader contemplation. Since the announcement of its call, this XVI BEAU has aimed to highlight those projects capable of estimating a broader perspective, hosting expanded operative strategies that could hint at the future. If politics and activism help define pressing needs, art and architecture can catalyze yet unpublished concerns that will become visible tomorrow. In the ability of architecture to think in the medium term, acting in the short term, arises the simultaneous opportunity to respond to current challenges and guide the future of our habitat and territory.
TIME BOXES
Every architectural project can respond to a dual time: one that attends to immediate requirements, circumstantial circumstances, or the limitations inherent in imminent action, and another, less explicit and broader, which encompasses the purposes that transcend the specific resolution and suggests the idea of a mid-term future. In the constellation of luminous affinities of 20th-century art, there is a beautiful place for the friendship of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. The latter helped him assemble the first chests in which the venerable French chess player enclosed reproductions of his works, like his Boîte-en-valise. Cornell would later continue assembling his own boxes, small enclosures, domestic variations, and dreamlike theaters. Cornell’s urns, made with the patience of a craftsman and the imagination of an architect, are mysterious works that, like the Time Boxes of this XVI Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, flow between the functionality of today and the dreaming of tomorrow. In the exhibition project of this XVI BEAU, the awarded architectures are shown in this dual register through a compact object, akin to a Duchampian valise, easy to transport and stack in its itineraries, which when placed expands housing within its virtual interior two complementary hemispheres: the one that represents and describes the project to be exhibited, where to arrange the plans and images that record the project in its present, and the half that illustrates the non-evident ambitions of the proposal, a free and heterogeneous collection of objects, writings, images, conceptualizations, references, previous versions of the projects, assemblies, construction process documents: the imaginary that each awarded team contributes and that allows revealing their aspirations of a better future beyond the concreteness of the projects. The birch plywood boxes follow common design guidelines, although each team personalizes its own, embracing spatialities that, alongside each other, create a matrix of expanded places, with various horizontal and vertical planes, like Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes in Marfa, equal and different. Each piece functions as an object that, when discovered, becomes a self-supporting and self-illuminating exhibitor, flowering like a book and showing each project, and also as an open ark, seedbed or cabinet of curiosities, containing that other compendium of records. The archipelago of boxes forms a landscape of intertwined present and future times. In this way, visitors not only attend to the final result of each project but also to the often hidden sustenance that describes the process, where the potentiality and pretensions that, materialized or not, make up the deepest aspirations of each intervention are preserved. These time boxes, like itinerant suitcases, once placed in the exhibition space, will remain open and will unfold the necessary facets to exhibit the two complementary worlds that converge in the project. Citizens will be able to appreciate the richness of present and future nuances of the project and will be able to understand, not only by attending to the plans but also by observing an imaginary around them, the determining role that architecture, between present efficiency and viable dreaming, has in the shaping of the habitat in the Me-dio Pla-zo.
