2023 European Conference on Architecture & the Media

Barcelona, April 2023
The 3rd edition of Architecture & the Media will discuss the role of social media in the dissemination and access to architecture).

The third edition of the European Conference on Architecture and the Media, which will take place on April 24 and 25 in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion and will also be streamed, will focus on debating the role of social media in the dissemination of architecture, what opportunities they offer compared to other media, and the risks and advantages associated with them.

Architecture & the Media is organized by Fundació Mies van der Rohe with the communication consultancy specialized in design and architecture Labóh, with the support of Creative Europe, as part of the dissemination of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Awards.

Conceived as a space to exchange experiences and good practices between cultural institutions and organizations, communication professionals, architects, and architecture lovers, it will count on general and specialized journalists who will discuss the role of the media and social media in the diffusion of contemporary architecture.

Architecture & the Media ‘23 builds on the success of its first two editions, in 2018 and 2020, which focused on the general and specialized press, printed and online, and on television, radio, and audiovisual media, respectively.

This year the event is part of the activities of +MODEL, within the framework of Model. Barcelona Architectures Festival.

Curated by the communication expert Miriam Giordano, the debates and conferences will focus on the role of social media and how they open up new perspectives in the dissemination of architecture. In this edition of Architecture & the Media, there will also be a debate on whether or not social media improves the dissemination and understanding of architecture among the general public.

1 Opening Conversation
2 Roundtables 
13 Speakers
1 Workshop
1 Closing Conversation

SOCIAL MEDIA GENERATED NEW WAYS OF COMMUNICATING ARCHITECTURE TODAY?

Faced with the questions that guided the first editions of Architecture and the Media, we would now like to open the debate on the role of social media in the dissemination of architecture: what opportunities do they offer compared to other media? and what risks, if any, are involved?

On the one hand, the impact of social media allows architects to no longer rely on magazines and critics to even showcase and validate their architecture. Social media eliminates the middle-person between the architect and their audience, allowing the architect to showcase their artwork directly. On the other hand, we want to encourage learning beyond looking, to be aware of the social, political, and historical context as well as the aesthetic.

The third edition Architecture & the Media, next to general topics, will focus on how different social media channels contribute to spreading the knowledge about architecture and make a step further in exploring the role of image in the dissemination of the discipline. The event will be held during MODEL. Barcelona Architectures Festival (April 20th – 30th).

The conferences will count on renowned international professionals. Maite Sebastiá, recently appointed director of Architectural Digest – AD España, will open the event on the 24th in a conversation with Ane Cortzen, multi-award-winning presenter of the Danish radio and television DRTV. They will be in charge of initiating the debate on how social networks have allowed a broader audience to appreciate and understand architecture together with the concern for simplifications and trivialization of content, implicit issues in the most viral phenomena.

April 25 will begin with a round table discussion with the English journalist Frances Williams, from the influential magazine The Architects’ Journal, Erik Harley, an artist and expert in Urban Studies who makes construction nonsense visible on social networks in a humorous way, and the journalist and writer Andrés Rubio, chief for almost 20 years of the El Viajero supplement of El País. Under the title “As long as they talk about it?” all of them will discuss the new opportunities and spaces to debate, criticize and denounce the abuses of which architecture can be a victim or an accomplice.

The second round table of the morning “Everyone’s Architecture” will discuss the opportunities that the new digital and social tools offer for the dissemination of architecture to general public, from different approaches, such as the more cultural one by Antoni Ribas Tur from the newspaper ARA, the more didactic by the architect and influencer Luis Lope de Toledo or the more technical by Cristina Nadotti, a journalist specializing in sustainability in the newspaper La Repubblica.

Architecture & the Media will also offer the opportunity during the afternoon of the 25th to share experiences and debate in an operational format in the workshop directed by Christiane Bürklein, a versatile professional who has worked in communication for international architecture studios such as MVRDV or KCAP, as well as being a journalist and founder of the architecture blog Floornature.

The closing conference on April 25 at 7:30 p.m. “Visions as Artworks” will be attended by David Basulto, architect and founder of Archdaily, one of the best-known architecture magazines in the world. Basulto will talk with Federica Sofia Zambeletti, also an architect and founder of the digital magazine KoozArch, specialized in researching and exploring architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Both will reflect on how “imaginary” architecture is becoming viral content on the networks, allowing the general public to discover and appreciate the beauty and inspiring power of architectural design, they will highlight the importance of the role of the image in the dissemination of architecture, perhaps leading us to new evolutions of this discipline in the metaverse and, why not, to the next edition of Architecture and the Media.

In previous editions, the speakers included, among others, Oliver Wainwright, architect, and architecture critic for The Guardian, the Dutch photographer Iwan Baan, Sandra Hofmeister, editor-in-chief of the German magazine Detail, Iñigo Picabea, a cultural journalist for RNE, and Edwin Heathcote, architecture critic for the Financial Times, all of them illustrious exponents of a very specific niche in the communication sector and at the same time very necessary to make something as important as the quality of the environment we inhabit and live in more understandable, criticizable and how it can be improved by each citizen.

Architecture & the Media is organized by Fundació Mies van der Rohe and Labóh with the support of Creative Europe as part of the dissemination program of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Awards.