48h Open House Barcelona. Festival of the architecture
Architecture is much more than its aesthetic appearance, it is art and functionality, but, most importantly, it is a sum of structured and ordered spaces that have impact on us. The original image is the façade, the compositional element or the dress that most identifies it, and the one that is most subject to styles and fashions. This year, festival undressed the architecture of more than 200 buildings, to discover their interiors and promote architectural knowledge from the experiential experience of their spaces.
Undressing architecture is what European architects did at the beginning of the twentieth century, stripping of ornamentation to think about it on a human and social scale. Here, during the Second Republic, a group of Catalan architects, the GATCPAC, initiated modern architecture in Catalonia by bringing those avant-garde ideals.
In this ninth edition of the festival, it will be reflected the importance of the architectural experience in the learning of architecture and the need to go beyond the front of the façade to understand space by graphically changing the appearance of six iconic buildings of the six cities that participate this year, with dresses of another style or function: the Arc de Triomphe and the city hall of Barcelona, with rationalist dresses inspired by the theme of the year; the Can Roig i Torres Municipal Music School of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, with a glass curtain wall; the Can Manyer Library of Vilassar de Dalt, that is dressed with the incredible hydraulic tile of its interior; the dress of the Tower of the Creu de Sant Joan Despí is grafted from the Melnikov house in Moscow to claim a rationalist Jujol advanced in its time; the Captaincy building of the Port of Barcelona dressed with Roman mosaics from Baetulo, and in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat dressed the Hotel Toyo Ito as if it were a chimney of the factory’s past of the city.
As a novelty of the year, the program claims water as a generator of life and of the landscape built in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, both from a technical and artistic point of view. We offer you twenty activities, among which we highlight two very different approaches of the architect Arata Isozaki: the reform and extension of Casaramona and the city of water; and the Museu Agbar de les Aigües, a good example of conservation of modernist industrial heritage.
What is behind the facades of our cities? You have the answer during the weekend of October 27 and 28, discovering the architecture of Barcelona, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Vilassar de Dalt, Sant Joan Despí, Badalona and L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. All this thanks to the more than a thousand volunteers (architects, users and owners, guides and support) who undress them for you.
