Copenhagen offers these days exhibitions and activities linked to its status as the international capital of architecture in 2023, a distinction granted by Unesco. Posters designed by the artist Ib Antoni in the postwar period are displayed in a museum, within the framework of the Wonderful Copenhagen campaign, which contributed to overcoming the image of a taciturn city. The offer of indoor events is interesting. Especially remarkable is the So Danish exhibition, 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.
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 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 he sets his mind to it, he can even dust off a campaign that shared objectives and successes with Wonderful Copenhagen: Barcelona, Posa't Guapa, launched by the City Council in 1985 under the direction of Ferran Ferrer.
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 Council and Official College of Architects of Catalonia through the Mies van der Rohe Foundation) is the new Mercado de los Encants. And the environment, so open as to include activities intended for professionals and others for the general public, like, for example, a popular meal in Plaza Coderch.
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”.
In this same space, which is slowly recovering from the great nonsense that its conversion into a motorway junction entailed, the Design Hub (DHUB) exhibition on digital art, Digital Impact , will be inaugurated, coinciding with Model, directed by Pep Salazar and curated by Héctor Ayuso.
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.
