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Beautiful Failures is the story of construction-destruction-construction that reflects on the rich history of the Barcelona Pavilion, decoding and rethinking its architecture based on its materiality and offering new readings of the pavilion’s nature.
Beautiful Failures deconstructs the iconic building for the first time, [lifting the travertine slabs], exposing its fragility along with its various truths, repairs, corrections, and constructive differences to the original.
By cataloguing and installing more than 2,000 defective glass pieces collected from glassblowing workshops around Barcelona, we explore the transparency and reflectiveness of glass – material capabilities that revolutionized modern architecture at the beginning of the 20th century, epitomized by the Barcelona Pavilion.
In this birth and death cycle, all elements play an important role: from the history of the Pavilion, implicit in our actions with the travertine, to the accumulated life in each of the glass pieces.
The resulting installation and arrangement of glass upon lifted travertine is a complete disturbance of the intended free-flowing movement of the Pavillion. The glass and voids in the floor obstruct natural movement, challenging the visitor to pause and observe the spaces through a new perspective.
BEAUTIFUL FAILURES
Discarded glass and the
Barcelona Pavilion
PUBLISHED BY
ELISAVA
Barcelona School of Design and Engineering in collaboration with Fundació Mies van der Rohe Barcelona, 2021
AUTHORS
Stella Rahola
Roger Paez
Toni Montes
+ MEATS 2019-20 students
+ MEATS 2020-21 students
MEATS 2019-20 STUDENTS
Dalia Al-Akki, Jana Antoun, Juan Arizti, Marta Borreguero, Elena Caubet, Ines Fernandez, Tanvi Gupta, Stephanie Ibrahim, Tracy Jabbour, Yunling Jin, Jad Karam, Selen Kurt, Alexa Nader, Joelle Nader, Assil Naji, Mokshuda Narula, Tiago Rosado, Eirini Sampani, Montserrat Sevilla, Brentsen Solomon, Kuan Yi Wu
MEATS 2020-21 STUDENTS
Agustina Angelini, Chloe Rood, Dasstan Bissen, Elsa Romero, Gala Knoph, Giulia Tufariello, Irini Vazanellis, John Gillen, Julia Llorens, Liana Kalaitzoglou, Malak Ghemraoui, Momen Nabil, Sasha Zaitceva
Beautiful Failures exhibited at the Barcelona Pavilion in April 2021.