These days, Copenhagen offers exhibitions and activities linked to its status as the international capital of architecture in 2023, a distinction granted by Unesco and which will fall to Barcelona in 2026.
In a museum, the posters designed by the artist Ib Antoni in the postwar period are displayed, within the framework of the campaign Wonderful Copenhagen, which contributed to overcoming the image of a taciturn city. The offer of indoor events is interesting. Especially remarkable is the exhibition I’m Danish at the Danish Center for Architecture.
The most festive activities, however, will have to wait a few weeks, until the temperatures moderate. Among other things, the organizers have programmed a popular race that will explore the architectural heritage of the city, the Architecture Run.
The Model festival and the new DHUB line project Glòries as a pole of innovation
Those who sign up will be able to see how Copenhagen, in the style of Oslo, has succeeded in converting its docks into a first-rate cultural hub, with unique (and controversial) buildings, such as Henning Larsen’s opera; Boje Lundgaard and Lene Tranberg’s Royal Danish Playhouse; the Museum of the Danish Resistance (same authors); The Black Diamond, the library by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects; the Dorthe Mandrup contemporary art museum, or the same building as the Dansk Arkitektur Center, by OMA.
Barcelona cannot yet boast of a port with large architectural interventions for cultural purposes. Theirs with the port culture is a failed story: there are the ruins of the IMAX, the deceased Maremágnum cinemas, lost opportunities…
But no one doubts that, as a whole, the city will be in 2026 a very worthy successor to Copenhagen as the capital of architecture. If you set your mind to it, you can even dust off a campaign that shared objectives and successes with Wonderful Copenhagen : the Barcelona, pose’t pretty ,launched by the City Council in 1985 under the direction of Ferran Ferrer.
All the stories told in the Encants will come together at the Model festival
But, for now, what is underway is a festival that is destined to be the embryo of Barcelona 2026 and, who knows, of a long-term event. It is the Model festival, which in its second edition will take place, starting on April 20, around Plaça de les Glòries.
The main venue chosen by the organizers (City Hall and Col·legi Oficial d’Arquitectes de Catalunya through the Fundació Mies van der Rohe) is the new Encants market. And the scope is so open as to include activities aimed at professionals and others for the general public, such as a popular meal in Plaza Coderch.
Eva Franch maintains that in Glòries one sees that the city is a monumental effort
Model is inspired this year by the concept of radical empathy, the extreme capacity to understand and assume the concerns of a changing environment. Its director, the architect Eva Franch, admits the extra motivation of acting in an area, Plaça de Glòries, where the city is undergoing a reconstruction process: “In Glòries you can see that the city is a monumental effort; here you see the layers of the earth and the different legacies”.
Eva Franch, director of the Model festival
In this same space, which is slowly recovering from the great nonsense that its conversion into a motorway junction entailed, the Disseny Hub (DHUB) exhibition on digital art will be inaugurated, coinciding with Model. digital impact directed by Pep Salazar and curated by Héctor Ayuso.
Another cultural axis: the one on line 1
A few days ago, reference was made here to the new cultural axis of metro line 2, with stops such as the García Márquez library, Piramidón, the MHIC or the future Bon Pastor. The new director of the Museu del Disseny, José Luis de Vicente, has another in mind: that of line 1, which links the pole of creativity that has always been Montjuïc with the renovated Glòries square and the technological and cultural 22@. In fact, as stressed by the director of the DHUB, Mireia Escobar, the Glòries stop will have an exit in the very bowels of the building.
All this, just when José Luis de Vicente (former curator of Sónar+D) takes over the Museu del Disseny with the same plan to catalyze the talent that the city concentrates around science, technology, art and design. In the next few days he will specify what his intentions are.
The almost perpetual works of Glòries make it impossible to perceive the potential of an urban nucleus called to be a benchmark for the new creativity in Barcelona. But it cannot be ruled out that one day, as chimerical as it may seem, the bulldozers will disappear and the result will be the central park of a great creative district.
architecture leadership
No one dares to set a date, but the works on Plaça de Glòries are advancing and the day when the city will reunite with this space until now sacrificed to road traffic is not far away. The director of the Model festival, Eva Franch, claims for architecture the right to lead this renaissance. In her opinion, architecture should be able to integrate all the creative institutions around the square and create an unusual space of transversality.
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