beautiful failures
Together with all the Master's in Ephemeral Architecture team, we worked on an intervention for the Mies van der Rohe Pavillion. "Beautiful Failures" works on fragility, detecting the two most delicate materials in its construction: the glass and the travertine floor. The proposal is based on a fundamental material order that makes it possible to revisit this apparently polished, perfect and safe architecture from its most vulnerable side. The installation consists of 17 raised travertine slabs that reveal the under-space and contain defective pieces of glass, originally from artisan workshops in the city of Barcelona.
The glass pieces correspond to a collection 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 ruins 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.
The new landscape resulting from the partial lifting of the pavement and the relationship with the pieces of glass finds analogies with a stratigraphic excavation using a grid system, commonly used in archaeology.
