After the record numbers obtained in 2023, with more than 100,000 visitors to the Barcelona pavilion and more than 400,000 attendees to exhibitions organized around the world, the Mies van der Rohe Foundation has presented its program for this year. The 2024 season will be full of collaborations, awards and research, which seek to promote architecture and experimentation from multiple disciplines. “We work with proposals to transform the pavilion, from different perspectives, new ways of understanding and new interpretations,” says Iván Blasi, director of programs and awards at the foundation.
On January 17, the 40 works selected for the final of the Eumies Awards, organized by the European Union and the foundation, will be announced in Dublin, where the award for contemporary architecture and another for the emerging project, which seeks to reward young talent, will be presented. .
With the aim of promoting women’s research in architecture, a new call for the Lilly Reich scholarship will be opened on March 8, Working Women’s Day. The results of the scholarship call will also be presented in tribute to the German designer, who was one of the few professors at the Bauhaus school and who collaborated with Mies van der Rohe. The last edition of the scholarship was awarded to the proposal ‘Anna Bofill: contracanto architecture’. In addition, the publication Lilly Reich in Barcelona by Laura Martínez de Guareñu will be presented in December of this year.
The foundation has also presented projects that link architecture with other arts, such as music and sculpture. In that sense, the music pavilion, Screen Pavelló and the reading pavilion will be built on Sant Jordi’s day. For June, the SonarMies will be held, a proposal for sound experimentation that reflects on the ecosystem, scientific research and art. “A new ecosystem has been found on the planet, which oceanographers are seeking to protect. The intervention will play with the transparencies of the pavilion, with the depth of the sea, the lights and this new ecosystem sensitive to the lights,” comments the person in charge of SonarMies, Lluís Nacenta, who highlights that the protagonists of this research on Mies and the ecosystem are an oceanographer, a biochemist and the artistic team led by Sofía Crespo, an artist who inspires her work in biology.
The pavilion will also host the intervention Splashing Mies, by sculptor Alberto Peral. In it, the artist will join the two pools of the place to mix art with architecture. “It is interesting to do a joint collaboration. It is incredible to be able to work here and a great responsibility,” comments the artist. “I seek to generate a little movement in this space, and occupy water, which is the most ductile and modifiable material,” he adds.
This year the foundation will also once again be part of Viu Montjuïc and the open days on the first Sunday of each month, as has been a tradition in recent years and which in 2023 accounted for a quarter of the visitors. “We will work to enrich the cultural offer of architecture in the city of Barcelona, ??which will host the Congress of Architects in 2026,” comments Anna Ramos, director of the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, which will also receive the intervention Suspendre el Cel del Brazilian photographer Caio Reisewitz and In(visible) Energy, from The Bartlett School of Architecture in London.
