How can we regenerate cities? Will we be able to achieve the environmental objectives that the European Union has set for 2050? And, in this sense, what role do architecture and the materials with which we build play? With the aim of answering some of these questions, the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona inaugurates this Tuesday Mass is More, a project that explores the use of regenerative and decarbonizing architectural materials in construction and that has been promoted through the Built by network Nature (BbN),
The installation, a cantilever that covers the wooden pavilion of Galicia and is designed by Daniel Ibáñez and Vicente Guallart from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and Alan Organschi from Bauhaus Earth (BE), will be on display until the 9th of october.
The project is complemented by a video installation by the filmmaker Jaume Cebolla that reflects the material transformations that the harvested wood undergoes and a diorama that shows the path that the wood takes from the forest to the city, as well as its properties regarding carbon storage during storage. road. It also highlights the reinterpretation of the central onyx wall from a cross-laminated wood panel (CLT), made up of different types of wood and a digital application developed by Bestiario, a leading company in data visualization, which offers a comparison between the impacts environmental measurements of the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion and the new solid wood installation.
The idea, Guallart explained in a press conference, is “to create a dialogue between past and future, between the most advanced materials of the 20th century and the 20th century. At the IAAC we have always worked to be at the forefront of architecture and anticipate what was going to happen. In our beginnings we focused on how the digital world would transform cities. Now, instead, our efforts are in ecology and in exploring the use of biogenic materials for architecture. And there, wood plays an important role since it is the concrete of the 21st century and is called to annihilate the effects of climate change”.
The inauguration of the project coincides with the central week of the events of Barcelona European Forest City 2022. With this framework as a background, the designers of the different facilities have taken the opportunity to defend wood as "a CO2 sink", for which reason have been in favor of a new forest management. In this sense, Ibáñez explains that "today we associate deforestation with unsustainable efforts, but if we build from now on with more wood, there will not be fewer forests, but a larger forest area that will be created to meet demand".
Despite the fact that the exhibition ends in Barcelona on October 9, from the pavilion they anticipate that “the useful life of that wood does not end”, since it will be exhibited at the Rebuild 2022 fair and, later, it will take the form of a pavilion next to the urban orchards from Lugo. "It would not make sense to promote ecology and not reuse all this material," acknowledges Ibáñez.
The Mass is More project, on the other hand, serves to launch Mass Madera, a Spanish network of pioneers in construction with industrialized solid wood, whose purpose is none other than "to promote industrialization and the reduction of CO2 emissions associated with the building.
