These days, Copenhagen offers exhibitions and activities linked to the status of international capital of architecture in 2023, a distinction granted by Unesco. A museum displays the posters designed by the artist Ib Antoni in the post-war period, as part of the Wonderful Copenhagen campaign, which helped to overcome the image of a taciturn city. The offer of indoor events is interesting. The exhibition So Danish, at the Danish Center for Architecture, is particularly noteworthy.
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 verify that Copenhagen, in the style of Oslo, has managed to convert the docks into a first-rate cultural axis, with unique (and controversial) buildings, such as Henning Larsen's opera house; the Royal Danish Playhouse by Boje Lundgaard and Lene; the Danish Resistance Museum (same authors); The Black Diamond, the library of Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects; the contemporary art museum of Dorthe Mandrup, and the same building as the Dansk Arkitektur Center, by OMA.
Barcelona still cannot boast of a port with major architectural interventions with a cultural purpose. Its relationship with port culture is a failed story: we are reminded of it by the ruins of the IMAX, the defunct Maremàgnum cinemas, lost opportunities... But no one doubts that, as a whole, the city will be a very worthy successor of Copenhagen as capital of architecture. If he proposes, he can even dust off a campaign that shared goals and successes with Wonderful Copenhagen: Barcelona, make yourself beautiful, launched by the City Council in 1985 under the direction of Ferran Ferrer.
For now, however, what is underway is a festival that is called 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, from April 20, in the surroundings of Plaça de les Glòries. The main headquarters chosen by the organizers (City Council and Official College of Architects of Catalonia through the Mies van der Rohe Foundation) is the new Mercat dels Encants. And the scope, so open as to include activities intended for professionals and others for the general public, such as, for example, a popular lunch in Plaça Coderch.
The Model is inspired this year by the concept of radical empathy, the extreme ability to understand and take on 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 in the midst of a reconstruction process: "In Glòries you can appreciate that the city is a monumental effort ; here you see the layers of the earth and the different legacies”.
In this same space that is slowly recovering from the great waste that resulted in its conversion into a freeway junction, the Design Hub (DHUB) exhibition on digital art, Digital Impact, will be inaugurated, coinciding with the Model , directed by Pep Salazar and curated by Héctor Ayuso.
All this, just when José Luis de Vicente (former curator of Sónar D) is in charge of the Design Museum with the same plan to catalyze the talent that the city concentrates around science, technology, art and design .
The almost perpetual works of Glòries prevent us from perceiving the potential of an urban center called to be a benchmark for Barcelona's new creativity. But it cannot be ruled out that one day, however chimerical it may seem, the excavators will disappear and the result will be the central park of a large creative district.
