BEAUTIFUL FAILURES
Discarded glass in the Mies Pavilion
Picture by Dalia Al Akki
Beautiful Failures is a site-specific pop-up installation in partnership with Stella Rahola that will be displayed in the Mies Pavilion, Barcelona 2021.
Beautiful Failures is a story of construction-destruction-construction to reflect on the rich history of the German Pavilion of Barcelona 1929 International Exhibition.
BEAUTIFUL FAILURES INSTALLATION
Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, Barcelona
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.
Inside the Pavilion
The idea behind this short video is to get a glimpse of the pavilion through the glass, vice versa.
It is a delusion created through studying the relationship between the transparency and fragility of the glass and the pavilion.
CREDITS
Dalia Al Akki, Jana Antoun, Jad Karam
Outside the Pavilion
The idea behind this short video is to be able for you to see our exploration process with these beautiful glass pieces. Through visualizing the glass move and express itself, the viewer will begin to notice that pieces describe themselves.
CREDITS
Dalia Al-Akki, Juan Arizti, Elena Caubet, Alexa Nader, Joelle Nader, Tiago Rosado, Eirini Sampani, Montserrat Sevilla, Kuan Yi Wu
THE STUDY BEHIND
Inventory Beautiful Failures is a collection of discarded hand blown glass pieces, collected by Elisava’s Masters in Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Space Design students, under the supervision of Stella Rahola Matutes and Roger Paez, in collaboration with Fundació Mies van der Rohe.
The process started with collecting around 2000 borosilicate glass pieces from craft studios in Barcelona. Those were then sorted and divided into families, based on common morphological characteristics. Seventeen families were formed, each given a strong historical woman’s name with a back story related with its morphology.
From the 2000 pieces, a total of 1126, therefore 57% of the glass pieces were selected, sorted and measured. Of those 1126, 258 were photographed to be featured in the catalogue, resulting in 23% of the total amount.
This is a teaser of the catalogue that will be part of “Beautiful Failures” popup installation in the Mies Pavilion, Barcelona 2021.