BEAUTIFUL FAILURES

Fundació Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with the Master in Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces by Elisava, presents, from today to 18 April 2021, Beautiful Failures, a site-specific piece at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion.

This intervention, resulting from the academic work of the master’s students and tutored by Stella Rahola Matutes, sculptor and installation artist, and Dr. Roger Paez, Profesor and researcher in Elisava, works on fragility, identfying the two most delicate materials used in the construction of the Pavilion: glass and the travertine.

The installation consists of 17 raised travertine slabs that reveal the under-space resulting from a construction system that diverges from the solution of the original Pavilion. These 17 holes contain defective pieces of glass, originally from artisan workshops in the city of Barcelona. The glass pieces correspond to the collection made by the students of more than 2,000 units discarded by craftsmen’s workshops. They are made of borosilicate glass of German origin, which cannot be recycled in our country. The rubble and discarded pieces make it possible to establish a link with the Pavilion’s past history, while raising questions of sustainability for the present at the same time.