BEAUTIFUL FAILURES
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
BEAUTIFUL FAILURES works on fragility, identifying the two most delicate materials of the celebrated Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, glass and the travertine of the pavement, to revisit this seemingly perfect architecture from its most vulnerable side. BEAUTIFUL FAILURES seeks a more inclusive and sustainable approach to our cultural heritage and material culture through re-use and re-reading, exploring the empathy generated by aesthetic attitudes that develop an affective relationship of care.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
BF puts into value cultural heritage in the spirit of sustainability, aesthetics and inclusiveness. It deals with cultural recycling of discarded materials through confrontational yet delicate aesthetics to foster inclusiveness, community-building and cultural debate.
BF works on fragility to revisit a seemingly polished, perfect and safe architecture from its most vulnerable side. From the formal point of view, it consists of raised aged and repaired travertine floor slabs from the Pavilion containing defective pieces of glass collected from artisan workshops in the city of Barcelona. The more than 2,000 discarded glass pieces are made of borosilicate glass of German origin, which cannot be recycled locally. These discarded pieces establish a link with the Pavilion’s past history, while raising questions of sustainability for the present.
The new landscape resulting from the partial lifting of the pavement and its relationship with the glass pieces finds analogies with a grid-like stratigraphy, commonly used in archaeological excavations. Enhanced by an original soundscape, the Mies Pavilion presents a rite of both discovery and burial.
BF is also a reflection on the nature of a space that is a living entity no longer limited to replicating the mythical 1929 original. Through multiple artistic interventions since 1996, the programmatic temporality of the original Pavilion has been reinterpreted as a sensorial temporality, turning the current Mies Pavilion into a multiform and organic space capable of reflecting on its aesthetic, spatial, material and historical qualities through constant change. A valuable lesson in an enriched understanding of identity from a sustainable and inclusive point of view
Key objectives for sustainability
BEAUTIFUL FAILURES’s key objectives in terms of sustainability can be summarised as rethinking material culture, showcasing local manufacturing, and promoting cultural recycling.
Rethinking our material culture from a radical sustainable standpoint is at the foundation of the BF project, which is developed in collaboration with Fundació Mies van der Rohe. The project investigates materials, their uses and their value, their cultural and emotional connotations, and how they have determined the development of the collective imaginary and the construction of the spaces we inhabit.
Together, we work with the Barcelona Pavilion with the aim of rethinking its architecture based on its materiality. The project is divided into three stages, each founded on the selection of a pair of fundamental materials used in the pavilion. BF is the first iteration of the project.
This trilogy will decode the pavilion based on the relationships between pairs of materials, setting off a dialogue between components of the pavilion itself and external elements discarded from local manufacture and artisan workshops. Using the celebrated Mies pavilion to offer new readings to rejected materials that are not usually recycled, these interventions are intended to reveal the wealth of critical approaches to material culture the pavilion (originally a temporary structure) can incite.
Roman travertine, green marble from the Alps, ancient green marble from Greece, golden onyx from the Atlas, chrome steel, satin, black glass and float glass... what happened to those beautiful materials turned into rubble after the pavilion’s demolition in 1929?
BF uses discarded borosilicate glass and repaired travertine slabs to promote the cultural recycling of materials based on re-use and re-reading, exploring a more responsible, inclusive and sustainable approach to our material culture. We are interested in the empathy generated by certain aesthetic attitudes that develop an affective relationship of care.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
BEAUTIFUL FAILURES’s key objectives in terms of aesthetics can be summarised as contrast, de-contextualisation, ephemerality and experience.
BF is the story of a construction-destruction-construction that reflects on the rich history of the German Pavilion built for the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona. At the same time, it considers current events that transcend material culture and call into question our memory and ethics through a bold aesthetic focus. We believe that the pavilion’s history and its context (temporariness and material quality) embrace and exalt the grudges and desires we come to tell.
BF explores an aesthetics of contrast between what is commonly considered successful and what is commonly considered failed. It does so by de-contextualising discarded glass pieces saved from an impending last trip to the landfill in the monumental space of the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, a canonical example of Modernist beauty.
BF explores ephemerality and fragility to offer a high-quality design style for temporary interventions as an alternative to the dominant flashy aesthetics usually associated with temporary space design. High-quality temporary solutions reinforce the intrinsic value of temporality and break down the still common association between temporariness and low quality. This is particularly pertinent in the context of the Mies pavilion, originally built in 1929 as a temporary structure.
Finally, BF pursues beauty through direct multisensorial experience, including visual, aural and haptic perception. Pursuing aesthetics that require situated experience reinforces the active role of citizens in creatively relating to the design, free from predetermined expectations about its nature and urban function. Simultaneously an art piece, a cultural manifesto and a disruptive action, BF purposefully navigates a carefully curated indeterminacy to leave the design open to multiple citizen interpretations.
Key objectives for inclusion
BEAUTIFUL FAILURES’s key objectives in terms of inclusion can be summarised as cultural heritage accessibility, citizen engagement through arts and fostering reuse and recycling of materials from an innovative point of view. A crucial general aspect of inclusion is BF’s extreme affordability both in terms of resources (material, labour, economic) and time, due to its temporal nature.
BF’s objective to promote cultural heritage accessibility for all was met through a balance between programmed activities (guided tours, specialised talks on site) and unprogrammed activities (open exhibition). BF temporarily transformed a well-known cultural heritage site into a social hub, triggering relations between local residents and tourists interested in arts and culture. A crucial point was the decision to not charge a fee for people who booked a visit. Besides encouraging people that would usually not attend cultural events or visit cultural heritage sites, it helped program some activities catered specifically to the expected visitors.
BF’s objective to promote citizen engagement through cultural heritage was met through the active involvement of the educational community (faculty and students) the manufacturing community (borosilicate glass workshops in Barcelona) and the institutional community (Fundació MvdR) in the definition of BF’s processes and results. During 2 full years (March 2019-April 2020) BF managed to generate an inclusive environment where students, artists, artisans, curators and cultural mangers met to exchange ideas and challenge each other. The site-specific intervention in the MvdR Pavilion is the result of such an inclusive work.
BF’s objective of addressing recycling from an innovative point of view, i.e. using art-based formats to reinterpret and give added value to discarded materials that are usually shunned, was achieved through a careful aesthetic approach to forsaken materials, using the framework provided by a cultural heritage site.
Results in relation to category
BEAUTIFUL FAILURES has 3 main results: site-specific intervention, publication and academic-industrial-institutional collaboration. BF’s impact in preserving and transforming cultural heritage is very explicit, as it temporarily transforms the Mies van der Rohe’s Pavilion in Barcelona, relevant to a relative minority, into a civic experience accessible for all. We claim that the best way to preserve cultural heritage is to permanently actualise its cultural relevance, and temporary interventions in consolidated cultural heritage is one of the ways to achieve it.
BF temporarily transformed the Pavilion into a situated multi-sensorial experience that helped raise crucial questions related to sustainability, production and material culture in the unique framework of a major cultural heritage site. The power experiencing a radically changed well-known cultural heritage is enormous, especially in the case of such a global cultural icon as the MvdR Pavilion. Experiencing a “different” pavilion helped citizens to address profound questions on sustainability, artisanship, production and beauty, all approached from the lens of care. BF enhanced access to cultural heritage for all, reinforcing the Pavilion’s role as a hub for positive cultural exchange and community-building, rather than a frozen image of its original past.
The results of BF are due to be published in both printed and digital formats by Fundació Mies van der Rohe, promoter and publisher of the EU Mies Awards, the most prestigious European architectural awards. This publication will give substantial visibility to BF, and will contribute to disseminate it aim to preserve and transform cultural heritage throughout Europe.
Finally, BF has started a very fruitful collaboration between academia (Elisava), industry (borosilicate glass workshops in BCN) and institutions (Fundació MvdR), one that has had a significant impact in the press and social media, both in specialized circles and for the general public.
How Citizens benefit
The involvement of citizens and civil society benefiting from BEAUTIFUL FAILURES has taken place in three different stages.
First, before the design phase, the public institution Fundació Mies van der Rohe, manager and curator of the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion, spear-headed the project of creating a temporary site-specific intervention to put into value this beacon of Modernist architecture in the spirit of sustainability and inclusiveness, using aesthetics to achieve this aim. After 2 years of collaborative work, BF is the result of this initiative.
Second, during the design phase, a collaborative format was established during which the design team and the public institution depositary of cultural heritage shared the objectives of the project and the difficulties encountered. Different design strategies were developed so they could be discussed and modified during collaborative working sessions. Once the final BF proposal was chosen, control sessions with technical services and cultural heritage representatives were held to troubleshoot specific problems and to align the proposal with the overall aim of putting into value discarded materials through aesthetics in order to foster inclusiveness, community-building and cultural debate on the horizon of sustainability.
Third, after the construction phase, the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, radically transformed by BEAUTIFUL FAILURES, was open to the general public to be experienced by all and spark debate on key societal issues such as sustainability, material culture and beauty. BF was subsequently communicated through press releases and specific events in order to maximise its impact and disseminate its core message—using temporary formats to put into value cultural heritage in the spirit of sustainability, aesthetics and inclusiveness.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
BEAUTIFUL FAILURES’s innovative character can be summarised as temporality, aesthetics of care and new approach to cultural recycling.
First and foremost, BF’s innovative character lies in positing temporality to achieve citizen engagement and community building. BF proposes adding art-based interventions and temporary space design to the already existing urban planning and city-making formats. We strongly believe that in the current situation of global emergencies, including health (e.g., COVID), environmental (e.g., climate) and social (e.g., refugees) challenges, cities need to use time-based strategies to achieve the level of resilience and sustainability we all need to meet UN SDG11 (Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable).
BF’s innovative character also appears in the deployment of an aesthetics of care, closely related to an ethics of care. It is urgent to rethink sustainability from a radical point of view, and one of the many channels that need to be addressed is a careful attitude towards material, cultural and relational aspects of our society. Material culture is a very relevant part of our societies, especially in urban milieux. BF is an attempt to reinvent our shared material culture from the lens of care, a necessary step towards urban sustainability and towards building a solidly inclusive future.
Finally, BF’s innovative character is clearly displayed in a novel approach to cultural recycling. We believe that cultural heritage sites and cultural associations can play a crucial role in consolidating sustainable mindsets through a new appreciation of the aesthetic values of waste. In this sense, being able to showcase the fragile beauty of the failed glass pieces and the travertine slabs (both of which cannot be conventionally recycled) in an awe-inspiring site-specific intervention, helps to convey a deep narrative of sustainability, one that goes beyond conventional modes of material recycling.
Learning transferred to other parties
BEAUTIFUL FAILURES’s transferability can be summarised as replicability, capacity-building and applied research.
First, BF’s results can be transferred to other interested parties, including but not limited to other cultural heritage sites, by replicating both its design-built process or its final configuration. The positive impact of BF to mobilise arts and culture for community-building can be replicated by reproducing a similar process in a different situation, or directly by replicating its final solution, adapted to any desired new location thanks to its temporal and modular nature.
Second, BF’s learnings can be transferred through capacity-building initiatives, ideally integrating academic (e.g., university), professional (e.g., apprenticeship) and institutional (e.g., cultural foundation) frameworks. Both competitive and non-competitive formats may be used to transfer BF’s learnings to interested parties, including cultural heritage sites or associations, local government, neighbourhood associations and community groups. Capacity building would expand the reach of the project well beyond BF’s specific final result and would allow for transfer not only of the design solution but of the techniques used to design it and produce it, its usability in actual urban situations and its strong community-building capacities.
Finally, the results of BF’s performance over its two-year gestation period can be transferred to further new research projects and technology transfer initiatives. These results will provide valuable intel on the project’s real impact, both in the sense of the amount and type of transformational artistic and cultural activities it has housed and in the sense of the communities it has helped to build—communities that hopefully will consolidate and last well beyond its programmed dismantling. Then, BF’s true purpose of preserving and transforming cultural heritage using aesthetics to foreground sustainability and inclusiveness will have been met.
