Projects

(1) Meeting at the Building Exhibition

Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, 2013

This exhibition on Building 111 was based on the one presented at the Barcelona College of Architects, expanding it to include post-occupation studies, such as interviews with the building’s residents and recent films. Moreover, since the space for the exhibition was three times larger than the one in Barcelona, we decided to take to Copenhagen a vast quantity of original drawings and models produced over the six years of the project.

Community space
The exhibition begins by representing the building’s communal plaza with large photographs arranged in a semi-circle. In the centre we placed some red tables where visitors could drink coffee whilst viewing videos of interviews with the residents after they had lived there for several months.

The process on the tables
Next, 100 linear meters of large-format, hand-drawn original documents were laid out over long wooden tables. The intention was to make clear the amount of time dedicated to developing this project, and the ups and downs of the design process.

The concrete façade
The construction of the reinforced concrete façade was explained using a full-scale polystyrene formwork, an exact reproduction of those used on the site.

Domestic space
Finally, visitors could experience a housing unit, built around one of the home appliance modules at full scale. In the lounge of this model apartment, visitors could sit and watch the short film Meeting at the Building, which portrays a summer day at Building 111 and gave the exhibition its title.

Workshop Barcelona / Copenhagen
A project workshop with students from Department 2 of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, held in Barcelona and Copenhagen in January 2013, which dealt with the issue of community spaces in collective housing in these two cities. It was presented through drawings, models and films.

4 Films
Complementing the information on Building 111, four films were shown on the bounding walls of the exhibition. As visitors walked among the tables they could pause, sit down and watch them.

(2) Ingredients & Cakes Exhibition

Leth & Gori, Copenhagen, 2013

This exhibition was the result of an invitation by Karsten Gori and Uffe Leth to show some of the studio’s work at the small gallery they run in the front area of their own architecture firm. It was an opportunity to link the two events as part of a single idea: things exhibited in one space complemented those exhibited in another.

Ingredients…
The four projects shown as part of this exhibition are forerunners to—“ingredients” of—the Building 111, and investigate concerns that subsequently appear in the housing project, such as domesticity, public space and natural light. Visitors to the exhibition in Leth & Gori’s gallery found shared points of interest with the exhibition at the Royal Academy.

…& Cakes
Discovering that this gallery was a former bakery gave us the idea of accompanying the exhibition opening with cakes connected to the projects on show. This was made possible thanks to the help of the Escribà bakery in Barcelona.

While pieces for the exhibition Meeting at the Building were purpose-made, in the case of Ingredients & Cakes we worked with material taken directly from our studio, without alteration. We took to Copenhagen the cabinets for the four projects we were going to put on display: the Mills Museum, the House in a Suitcase, Pius XII Square,  and Providencia House. These cabinets help the projects to travel. They were closed up in the studio and opened at the destination to directly reveal their interior, so we placed them in the gallery with the projects still inside or half-revealed.

The show, as a result, was very simple to install, it was only necessary to adapt the shop window, which we extended with a wider base to give it greater depth and to be able to display models there. In this stretch of the window, with the bases and paintings by Soraya Smithson, the specific design of the exhibit was focused.