Brussels has once again been the epicenter of the European Bauhaus Festival for the second consecutive year, an initiative launched by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, three years ago, which aims to promote the work of architects, artists and designers in a new movement around the European Green Deal.
What should the design of the products we use be so that they not only provide beauty and utility, but also play a role in the ecological transition? For four days, dozens of conferences and workshops in the Belgian capital, but also in various parts of the Twenty-Seven and in the Balkans, have reflected on this matter.
Ursula Von der Leyen launched the idea of creating a “European Bauhaus”, in homage to that movement around the school of architecture, art and design of the German city of Weimar in the 1920s, led by the architect Walter Gropius. In it, Vassily Kandinksy and Mies van der Rohe stood out.
Women also had a prominent place, but memory practically erased them, despite being instrumental in promoting it, such as Lilly Reich, essential in the construction of the German pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona Universal Exhibition.
The new Bauhaus aspires, just as the German movement did, to be useful to people. At the festival, which was held in the spectacular Museum of Art and History of Brussels, and in the Cinquantenaire Park, in the European quarter, dozens of projects were presented, four of which came from the Catalan capital.
Yesterday's conferences were very focused on how sustainable design and architecture can play a role in this new transformation. “Art and design can be agents for change,” defended Paola Antonelli, curator and director of Innovation and Development at the Metropolitan Museum of New York (MoMa).
This is also one of the maxims that Enorme Studio, a design and architecture office in Madrid, has contributed with its Portable City (which became one of the visitors' favorite places), which they have placed in the middle of the Cinquantenario park. as shown at the festival. It is a fixed greenhouse with a series of mobile stands with a vertical garden.
“The idea is how to enhance the use of public space through portable infrastructure,” Carmelo Rodríguez, its founder together with Rocío Pina, explains to La Vanguardia. “In all spaces there must be flexibility (…) we live in an increasingly changing society, the things we design have to respond, and the way is flexibility,” he argues.
Along the same lines, José Luis de Vicente, director of the Disseny Hub Barcelona, defends that sustainability and design must go hand in hand. “Today, design that does not put its way of operating, its ideology and materiality and sustainability at the center is not a design worth calling itself as such.” “The only possible design is the one that addresses the central role in the ecological crisis,” he concludes.
De Vicente was present at the festival, where he presented the Archipelago of Possible Futures initiative, together with Francesca Bria, which puts “at the center the idea that artists, designers and architects have a central role in European innovation policy.” explains the cultural researcher, who has brought together more than 40 organizations and professionals.
