KOOZ 99+ Imaginaris "invites architects from around the world to speculate on the future of Barcelona through a drawn manifesto", what prompted the collective exhibition?

EFG We all know too well that architecture’s ability to produce visions for the future is often relegated to shaping the ideas and agendas of an obsolete past. Economic, legal and political frameworks, built slowly and solidly over time, perpetuating an architecture that solidifies existing social and status quo relationships and rarely allows for the emergence of new ideas. This exhibition invited architects from all over the world to speculate on the future of Barcelona with both imagination and radical optimism, and to draw architectures that allow us to redefine the conditions of our present and, thus, open ourselves to the possibility of a different, more equitable and just future.

The exhibition is the disciplinary backbone of Model, an annual project launched this year in the city of Barcelona. It invites architects and citizens at large to rethink cities and the way we live in them by producing new imaginaries. As one of the artistic directors of Model, I believe it is important to share the visionary tradition of architecture in this inaugural edition and to put architecture drawing at the centre of the debate when trying to understand and produce new values and aesthetics. As a curator, I like to produce new collectivities that bring individuals together. Architects work within a highly competitive framework where strategic alliances should go beyond the professional framework into an aspirational one. I am interested in fostering transideological (transgenerational, transclass, transdisciplinary, …) bonds among architects that might not agree about the present, or the past, but I suspect might agree on the future.

99+ Imaginaris, presented drawings which speculated on future scenarios of the city of Barcelona conceived by architects from all over the world and produced throughout 2022. The desire to invite a diverse and broad constituency of voices allowed us to ask: who has the right to speak on behalf of who? What globalisms and localisms should we consider in shaping the future of our cities? What are the threads between generations? What are the visions among different socio-economic classes?

Each drawing, understood as a manifesto of thought and action, has proposed new values, principles, methods, aesthetics, materials and forms - that is, new models - that might help us continue to grow as a society and as a city.

KOOZ With the project Letters to the Mayor, developed during your tenure as director at Storefront, you invited architects to write letters to their city mayor as a means of opening up the debate around the making of cities and their public spaces, how and to what extent does this project and the format of the drawing manifesto sit in relation to the previous endeavour?

EFG Precisely, 99+ Imaginaris is methodologically speaking Letters to the Mayor, but also the Drawing Trilogy exhibitions. I developed both projects during my time at Storefront for Art and Architecture while working with a fabulous team including Carlos Minguez, Kara Meyer, Jinny Khanduja, and Iara Pimenta who worked on many of the international editions. The project Letters to the Mayor started in 2014 and took place across 23 different cities globally with the participation of more than 1000 architects and 30 local curators.

The Drawing Trilogy started in 2011 with a series of exhibitions focusing on the generation of architecture and architectural thought through drawing. The exhibitions, all presented at the iconic Storefront gallery space, invited 30 architects to draw Storefront. Each iteration reflected on different issues, “Measure” in 2015 looked into the quantifiable and incommensurable aspects of architecture in an era obsessed with data, “P.O.P Protocols, Obsessions, Positions” in 2012 looked into the politics of representations, and “Aesthetics Anaesthetics” in 2011 focused on the contemporary forms of representation driven by market forces. The subtitle of this first edition was “on clouds, birds, children, balloons, comics and axonometric” which are the anaesthetic objects that we use when envisioning architecture for market driven clients; children smiling with balloons, birds giving an idea of freedom, clouds loaded of dramatic colours with sublime aspirations, green surfaces as indicators of a sustainable future, all as elements of seduction without any architectural properties. As a parody, we made a wallpaper for the exhibition in which we removed all these cosmetic elements from the drawing and kept only the designed elements, the architecture. We had people from diverse generations and origins including Peggy Deamer, Malkit Schoshan, Andres Jaque, Maio, Jimenez Lai, Leong Leong, Vito Acconci, Bernard Tschumi, Ada Tolla, Steven Holl, James Wines, Caroline O'Donnell and more. We wanted to not only have young emerging voices, but also leaders in the profession to explore important issues of our time.

KOOZ The exhibition is part of the Model. Barcelona Architectures Festival, "a space for reflection and celebration that brings us experimental architecture and helps us to rethink how we wish to live together through new city models and imaginaries". How important is it to explore the architectural imaginary?

EFG While in some of the most advanced architecture schools, the imaginary is at the centre of the educational journey of an architect, in real life the imaginary is hardly present in the problem solving of a client’s brief. There are very few clients that have either the imagination or the political, legal or economic jurisprudence to ask significant questions in ways that enable substantial departures from the status quo.

Ildefons Cerda, the engineer that conceived what is now known as the Cerda Plan, was an entrepreneur who produced an imaginary – through literally a drawing - and who managed to convince the different stakeholders to make it ultimately happen.

As a curator, enabler, or agitator I like to think of myself as the client that everyone would like to have, but who never knocks on the door: the future; the one that asks you to think about how each one of us through our knowledge and expertise can contribute to the future of cities beyond the 4 year political mandate, or the board rooms of corporations, and produce new ideas that will make the visions for the future of cities better.

This first edition of Model. Festival d'Arquitectures de Barcelona,​​ co-organized by the City Council and the COAC, is the first major event of Barcelona towards becoming the World Capital of Architecture in 2026. Model is a space for plural and multidisciplinary reflection where to address how to face the climate emergency and the challenges of the XXI century. This first edition, directed by Beth Gali, Jose Luis de Vicente and myself, focused onRE-GROWTHand presented a series of installations, debates and experiments, as well as the opportunity to explore, through different lenses, the cultural richness of a city that has constantly redefined the way we think about cities and the built environment.

The 99+ Imaginaris exhibition is just a small part of the project, but one that we hope creates a tradition of situating speculative and visionary thinking/drawing at the centre of future conversations.

KOOZ What is the value in radically re-imagining the project of the city today, a time when our metropolises have been undoubtedly shaped by the pandemic?

EFG Over the last two years every one of us has had to reinvent our domestic spaces, our relation to the city, our needs and our desires. Every citizen has become more aware of the importance of green space, of social services, of care infrastructures, of community networks.The pandemic has made us all dream, imagine, speculate about the possibilities of a city that is still not. Many municipalities and governments have worked around the clock to produce solutions to the newly emerging needs with temporary solutions and tactical urbanisms. Barcelona, with the Super Block / Super Illa project was in many ways ahead of its time by reclaiming the street from the cars for its citizens, producing new and open green areas where historically there was just asphalt. The need for new imaginaries that help us understand how we can spatially address some of the urgent questions of our times with the newly gained perspectives that the pandemic left us with, is perhaps more needed than ever. We cannot go back to normal; we must go back to a better normal.

KOOZ You received proposals from architects of all ages, could you identify common threads among them?

EFG The re-naturalization of the city is the major theme. From the removal of the asphalt from the streets to the making of green areas where to grow tomatoes, to building new sophisticated facades that accommodate non-human species, to new ideas of co-living, to flooding the city ring roads for navigation purposes, the majority of contributions aim to provide speculative scenarios that go beyond dystopian narratives to provide architectural manifestations of what ifs.

KOOZ In addition to functioning as an exhibit, the project aimed to capture the broader public in a debate on the future of Barcelona. What kind of debate did the exhibition initiate and how do you seek to pursue this?

EFG The exhibition is, for me, a medium for the production of debates - even if silent - that the visitor produces throughout each visit. The exhibition design by Caterina Miralles and Jack Isle in the form of a sum sign is a continuous table that situates all drawings in the drawing plane. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to sit and draw their own visions while reflecting on the ones in display.

The exhibition opened with a public debate on the exhibition in Plaça Catalunya with 20 of the exhibition’s participants including Kersten Geers, Anna Puigjaner, Pablo Ros, Olga Subiros, Chris Ganterbein, Roger Tudo, Sandra Bestraten and co-curator Josewp Maria Montaner among otheres.. The conversations have continued via mediums which include newspapers, television and general press that I think are fundamental to the broad dissemination of ideas beyond the eco chambers of architectural discourse. In a surprising way, the project has captured a real desire for new imaginaries.

KOOZ Since you are an architect, what are your ambitions for the city of Barcelona?

EFG As part of Model, I organized a one day symposium, the Barcelona Protocol, where we invited architects, politicians, lawyers and poets to talk about three points they consider relevant for the production of futures in our cities, and specifically in Barcelona. Organized in 7 sections: Public Space, Public Housing, Public Infrastructure, Public Education, Public Culture, Public Futures, and Public Visions, we collectively built a soft manifesto. We produced a 50-point document that would make for a very long answer.

Public Space
All progressive urbanism today is focused on recovering and defining new notions of public space. A concept often misused, misappropriated, instrumentalized, politicized, surveilled, and financialized, “public space” is in constant redefinition. Occupied by cars in most of the big cities throughout the world, public space is a contested space that only a few cities are willing and able to reclaim towards a new vision of urbanity. Barcelona has produced pioneering models for public space, and it should continue to do so.

Public Housing
The boom of the property market and tourism has transformed cities across the globe into centers for financial speculation rather than spaces for inhabitation and public life. The production of a sustained landscape of affordable housing is one of the most important tasks concerning the life of cities in the decades to come. While the city of Barcelona has produced innovative legal frameworks that are focusing on producing an affordable housing context, I am interested in continuing to identify financial, spatial and typological models that can enable this landscape of affordability.

Public infrastructure
City planning and politics are inextricably linked. The way in which cities decide to invest represent -often- the values of those in power. How should cities grow, get connected, built, and unbuilt? What buildings or pieces of infrastructure should we build and which ones should we consider taking down? And how? While Barcelona has just passed a major political initiative in this area, it needs to continue to think about issues of reuse, upcycle, and rebuild from the preservation lens as well as the sustainability perspective.

Public Education
All schools of architecture today have the opportunity and the responsibility to articulate what our discipline can contribute to the world we live in, and to redefine what the education of an architect both can and should be.
What are the fundamental aspects of architectural education? How can we critically dismantle prevalent pedagogical models, and propose new educational spaces that address the social, political, technological and material agency that architects have in affecting the designed environment? What design methods and forms of reflection and speculation can we develop to creatively and professionally address the near and urgent future? Could a city like Barcelona become an architecture school?

Public Culture
For the last 30 years, investment in cultural infrastructures has been a major driver of urban transformation in capitals all over the globe. Prestige art institutions and districts have contributed to successful processes of regeneration, but also have been instrumentalized by the dynamics of real estate speculation that have put cities in the hands of capital.
Countless gentrified neighborhoods and spectacular brand new museums have shown us that culture today is often driven by business models or political agendas rather than by ideas. How can we produce a new cultural model for new cities, disentangled from the corrosive impact of financialization? How does the role of culture and the arts look like in new regenerative visions of our cities, through the lenses of diversity, decolonization and alternative practices?

Public Futures
What are the tools that we have as architects and policy makers to go beyond the timelines that frame elected governments to better serve the needs of future generations? Public innovation policies across the globe are reclaiming the tools of corporate foresight for the public good. However, long term policies of future making that advocate for intergenerational justice are difficult to communicate to a society that is looking for graspable solutions here and now. How far do we look and who is the inhabitant of this public future? What tools and instruments do we have as architects, urbanists and policy makers to enact long term change?

Public Visions
One of the most difficult intellectual and political constructions is to build a collective vision. Yet, once the “what” has been agreed, the almost impossible task is to agree about the “how”. What are the relevant matters affecting cities worldwide and how can cities learn from each other? How can politicians, policy makers, architects and citizens tackle those issues as a community?

My ambitions for the city of Barcelona is that it continues to experiment, to ask the right questions, and to produce new models.

Bio

Architect, curator, and critic, Eva Franch i Gilabert is the former Director of the AA Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York. Earlier this year Franch founded and co-directed MODEL, a new annual experimental architecture festival organized by the city government of Barcelona, the first event leading up to the Barcelona Architecture World Capital events and UIA congress in 2026. She is also the Head of the Future Architectures Platform at the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design at UMPRUM in Prague. Franch has taught and lectured across the world including Princeton University, Columbia University, The Cooper Union, and has received numerous honors and awards. During her tenure at the AA Franch initiated many ground-breaking initiatives including the AA Residence, a research and cultural platform to develop new ideas and forms of practice at the intersection of architecture, art, technology, policy and design with the AA Wood Lab, the AA Ground Lab and the AA Polar Lab, this last one directed and founded by Giulia Foscari, our protagonist today.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.