Mugak Architecture Biennial opens its central exhibition in San Sebastian with the Pritzker prize winner Wang Shu
- 'Inhabiting Change', located at the Basque Institute of Architecture, is the result of dialogue between figures from the world of architecture and the arts, who have added their original pieces, projects and representations of their work.
- Prestigious names such as the Pritzker prize winner Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, from the Amateur Architecture Studio, the researcher Beatriz Colomina, the studio amid.cero9 and the artist Isaac Cordal are taking part in the exhibition.
- The exhibition is divided into three rooms, one for each concept of the theme of this fourth edition of Mugak/: rebuild, re-inhabit and rethink.
This afternoon Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu are at the Kursaal Palace in Donostia, where they are giving a master lecture to officially open this fourth edition of Mugak/ in front of more than 500 attendees.
The International Biennial of Architecture of the Basque Country Mugak/ this morning inaugurated the central exhibition of this fourth edition. Located at the Basque Institute of Architecture and under the title 'Inhabiting Change', it presents a collective dialogue between renowned figures from the world of architecture and the arts, who have added their original pieces, projects and representations of their work to the exhibition. It will be open to the public from tomorrow until February 25, 2024.
The exhibition is curated by Bilbao architect María Arana, also curator of this fourth edition of Mugak/, which will be inaugurated this afternoon at the Kursaal Palace in San Sebastian. Two of the headliners of 'Inhabiting Change' will be there, 2012 Pritzker prize winner Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, founders of the Chinese firm Amateur Architecture Studio. Both also participated in this morning's presentation. In the evening, the event, with free admission, will begin at 7 pm and will officially kick off Mugak/2023 in front of more than 500 attendees.
Organized since 2017 by the Department of Territorial Planning, Housing and Transport of the Basque Government, Mugak/ reaches this fourth edition as the main architectural event of the Atlantic Arc and aspires to continue growing with respect to its previous edition, which brought together more than 70,000 attendees over an entire month of architecture.
“Mugak/ has become an unmissable event both for professionals in the sector and for the general public and has managed to attract experts and international benchmark companies from all over the world to all its events; it is a meeting point with the public open to new trends and concerns and which vindicates the social dimension of architecture and its ability to improve people's lives,” said the Minister of Territorial Planning, Housing and Transport of the Basque Government, Iñaki Arriola, this morning.
An exhibition for reflection
'Inhabiting Change' is based on the three concepts of this year's theme: 'to rebuild, to re-inhabit, to rethink'. “We are living in turbulent times of ecological, health, economic and social crisis. Times of great challenges for which we need urgent, imaginative and transformative solutions. Times in which it is urgent to rethink how we inhabit the world and how we will live in it in the near future. From a critical and unprejudiced point of view, this exhibition invites you to reflect on the etymological relationship between the words 'build', 'inhabit' and 'think' to which Heidegger made reference in 1951, in a Europe devastated by the Second World War,” said the curator, María Arana.
To this end, the Biennial has invited renowned names such as researcher Beatriz Colomina, the studio amid.cero9 and artist Isaac Cordal to exhibit their work. All of them have contributed their projects and works to 'Inhabiting Change', which distributes this reflection in the three exhibition halls of the Basque Institute of Architecture in San Sebastian. There they begin a dialogue that will also move to Vitoria-Gasteiz and Bilbao, with the conferences that the different participants will offer from today until November 24 in the three capitals.
Three rooms, three concepts
The first room, 'Rebuild', proposes reflection on the very role of architecture and its impact on the planet; on ideas such as the fact that 40% of global CO2 emissions are emitted by buildings, or on the destruction of its fundamental and social principles. It also speaks of reconstructing architecture itself and creating new ways of understanding and living it in this context of economic and social uncertainty.
Presiding over the room is 'Follow the leaders' (2009), an installation that the Galician artist Isaac Cordal has already taken to the streets of cities such as Brussels, Milan, London and Berlin. It is composed of pieces in the form of small businessmen in suits, surrounded by decaying urban scenarios that invite criticism on the inertia of the social mass, a commentary on a civilisation of grey urbanism, with tones ranging from ironic to desolate. It induces reflection on the contemporary dehumanisation of our civilizations.
It is accompanied by a representation of the Ningbo Historical Museum (2008), by Amateur Architecture Studio, through original materials and images. The building defends Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu's firm belief in caring for tradition in the face of the rapid destruction and unstoppable growth of their country's cities: the building's façade is created from rubble generated in the demolition processes produced in the same place where it now stands, since, according to the studio, “we cannot destroy history”. Four samples of the façade itself are exhibited, detailing the complex and handcrafted construction system proposed by the studio. In addition, large-scale photographs can be found.
The last piece in this room is 'Gran Vía Toxic' (2008-09), by the renowned Madrid studio amid.cero9. This is a project developed on the occasion of the centenary of the construction of Madrid's Gran Vía, which shows it from the perspective of destruction. It reflects on the impact of urban models and presents demolition as a reverse process, as a sequence of actions that can be innovatively planned and organised to offer an alternative way of building a city. A model of a shredding machine is exhibited, accompanied by large-scale computer graphics, as well as a floor plan of the Gran Vía itself and other visual materials.
The second section of this exhibition is 're-inhabiting'. The second exhibition hall of the Basque Institute of Architecture hosts different projects and low-tech architectures that achieve new forms of spatial and social mediation. It exposes the importance of using design as a technology to improve the habitat and create a home, addressing the idea that, together with research and awareness, these are tools that allow us to appreciate, value or recover the protective and life-building capacity of architecture.
This space will bring together the works of four professionals and architectural firms. One of them is Acha Zaballa Arquitectos with 'Loft Study House' (2018), a project that proposes how to generate dignified housing spaces by transforming empty commercial premises into social housing through design. The studio has been behind the renovation of three social housing units in Santutxu and Mina del Morro (Bilbao), which are shown through three racks of different sizes and colours with objects and photographs to recreate the domesticity of the re-inhabited premises.
The exhibition also includes 'The house of the day after' (2021), a renovation carried out by the Barcelona studio TAKK in a 110 m² house in Madrid. It was rethought as a succession of concentric spaces to achieve minimum energy consumption: a perfectly insulated 60 m² interior box ('winter house') was built, leaving the remaining 50 m² as an interior terrace (summer house). The project has peculiarities such as a single “communal” room and the proposal of the bathrooms from a playful vision, understood as spaces to be used, even in a crowd. It is represented in the room through a totem that evokes those interior partitions of the original house, where images of it are projected.
The work of Amateur Architecture Studio is again present in this room with Five Scattered Houses (2006). Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu claim the idea of traditional Chinese housing as the main axis for the urban development of a construction zone in the city of Ningbo. From southern China, this project of five scattered houses proposes an innovative translation of a historic house typology into a series of modern dwellings for the city centre. It can be found in 'Inhabiting Change' through models suspended in the air and some photographs of the houses.
Finally, the second room exhibits 'Architecture of Appropriation' (2019), a project promoted by researchers and architects Marina Otero Verzier, Katía Truijen and René Boer. It approaches squatting as an architectural practice and focuses on the analysis of various squatted architectures in the Netherlands through drawings, interviews and archive material. It is represented by a piece that stages the minimal elements that, according to the law in force in the Netherlands until 2010, were necessary to justify that a squatted space was being continuously inhabited (a bed, a chair and a table). The graphic and spatial design was developed by Maria Mazzanti.
The third and last exhibition room focuses on rethinking, and reflects on the idea of revisiting the architectural discipline itself and its pedagogical function, its critical and thought-generating capacity. “Architecture has to inhabit its own change, so this space for reflection contains projects that speak about the need to rethink a multifaceted discipline, whose pedagogical possibilities invite us to imagine other possible worlds," says Arana.
In first place are two pieces by the architect José María Torres Nadal. The first one, 'Backpacks to carry architecture on your back' has its origin in a meeting held in the mythical Arteleku in 1995, called 'Thinking-Composing/Building-Inhabiting', in relation to Heidegger's text. Almost 30 years later, José María Torres Nadal exhibits several of those backpacks containing cultural, emotional and affective records. One of them, 'The word and architecture', gives rise to the second piece, 'Architecture... despite Delirious New York', which critically revisits the cover of the famous 'Delirious New York' (Rem Koolhaas 1978), “the book-bible that has established the entire practice and theory of contemporary architecture".
Next on display is 'Radical pedagogies' (2013-2023), a project by the renowned Beatriz Colomina together with Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna Maria Meister. In the 1960s and 1970s, architectural education was shaken by an explosion of experimental pedagogical practices around the world, a revolution that is explored in this project. It also invites the questioning of inherited disciplinary hierarchies to take place again in educational spaces in the current context. It takes the form of a temporary tunnel, built with scaffolding, where a series of unpublished videos produced for this exhibition are shown.
Amateur Architecture Studio's third contribution is called 'Building with Nature' (2023) and comes from the course of the same name that has been taught for 14 years at the China Academy of the Arts. It addresses the cultural revitalisation of architectural construction in the country today and combines it with international concepts of sustainable development to find solutions to the serious disconnect between design and construction that prevails in national architectural education. Eight models made by students enrolled in this school's 2019 Architecture course are on display.
Finally, the exhibition closes with Worlding, which describes the working method of Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda both in their academic work and in amid.cero9. Worlding involves the definition of alternative buildings or landscapes to the current exploitation model. It is developed at the Institute of Architecture of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and is shown as a wooden structure with a series of drawings, floor plans and computer graphics made by the students.
The exhibition opens to the public on 26th October. On the occasion of the Mugak/ Biennial, from November 1 to 24, the Basque Institute of Architecture will be open from Tuesday to Sunday morning and afternoon (11 am to 2pm and 5pm to 8pm).
