The winning design of this first edition of the Tac! it was the “Aire” pavilion, by Madrid studio P + S Estudio de Arquitectura, led by Francisco Parada and Laura Salvador. The temporary pavilion, which its creators define as a "burlap pantheon", has already hosted press conferences, round tables and a concert this weekend. Music, scientific and literary conferences, conferences, exhibitions, poetry, workshops or reading clubs will meet in the winning pavilion, which will remain in Granada's Plaza del Humilladero until November 14. In its surroundings, you can visit the exhibition «Forgotten Architects».
Studios from Chile, Denmark, China, Germany and Spain participated this year in the contest. The jury, chaired by Iñaqui Carnicero, General Director of Agenda Urbana y Arquitectura, was made up of Lesley Lokko, Curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale; Sol Candela, director of the Arquia Foundation; Carmen Moreno, professor at the Superior Technical School of Architecture of Granada; Inês Lobo, professor at the Autonomous University of Lisbon and ISCTE; José Vallejo, Cultural Coordinator of the Granada City Council, and Javier Peña, Artistic Director of the event.
"AIRE" by P + S Estudio de Arquitectura. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal (Rocío Romero + Miguel de Guzmán) + Javier Callejas.
A young festival
Iñaki Carnicero, main promoter of the Tac! festival, says that he spent a long time regretting that in Spain there were no festivals of young architecture such as the Young Architect Program of Moma PS1 in New York; «I wanted Spanish architects to have that opportunity». The traditional work by the architect has changed, he explains, «today architects are social agents, they collaborate with other disciplines», and even «the architecture faculties of our country are reinventing themselves».
Society will also be rewarded with initiatives like this one. Especially if, as Sol Candela assures, young people are more aware of the need for sustainable architecture. But also because architecture is necessarily linked to the climate problem, "you have to count on young architects for what will be done in future cities", as Carnicero said.
"AIRE" by P + S Estudio de Arquitectura. Photograph by Pablo Roldan.
"AIRE" by P + S Estudio de Arquitectura. Photograph by Pablo Roldan.
A new architect profile?
It would seem that a new type of architect is emerging. A professional who is distinguished by high ecological awareness, the ability (and even the habit) of working with few resources, and a formal vision reminiscent of the Brutalism of the 1950s, characterized by showing the constructive elements of buildings.
For example, the words of Francisco and Laura, winners of the Tac contest! Festival of urban architecture, maintain that the beauty of a building must be "the result of the materials" and advocate "the honesty of the material". Furthermore, the P+S architects avoid any treatment of the material, which by changing naturally "introduces the time variable into the project". Indeed, the «Air» pavilion is made up of an exoskeleton where the scaffolding, which normally disappears in the construction process, forms part of the final state of the work. On the other hand, the artistic gestures of the project are reduced to the reflection of the scaffolding on the burlap during the day and to the “landmark character” or “lamp” that the enclosure acquires at night.
An identical "neo-brutalist" spirit prevails among the 23 proposals that the jury has selected from among the 95 participants for the Tac! Pavilion Competition Exhibition, which can be visited at the Higher Technical School of Architecture in Granada. Most of the projects resort to material nudity, and only two of the selected ideas ("Emergency Door" and "Big John") use colour. Curiously, the jury has valued a formal element: the verticality of the winning pavilion, which, according to Carmen Moreno, contrasts with the horizontality of the activities that are usually held in the square.
Another typical trait of the new architect is an environmental concern. This Saturday, the pavilion was the scene of a round table among the finalists of the contest, a talk that largely revolved around the sustainability of the proposals. Thus, for example, the winners of the contest took into account "the impact of waste" and decided on "global elements" such as scaffolding, rented from companies in the area, and "local elements" such as burlap, which could be reused, or like the stones, which will return to the Sierra Elvira quarry once the festival is over.
Among the finalists, the same trend can be seen: the «Big John» project proposed an enclosure made up of a network of folding chairs that citizens can take with them, so that «the pavilion enters their homes». "Emergency Door" poses a meeting point between the Darro River, the Genil, the city and La Vega, while "Active Poplar" explores the "bioclimatic" possibilities of the poplars. For its part, the "4GU45" project, which won third prize, incorporates the vegetation of La Vega de Granada into the urban space to "grow the city" and "vindicate the agricultural landscape". The trees used for the pavilion, the authors clarified, would be replanted. Also "La casa del aire", second prize, uses recycled material.
Growing up in the midst of economic, ecological and social crises, today's architect is a born economizer. And this is to the point that the award-winning pavilion is in this first edition of Tac! It is a hymn to savings: according to P+S, the assembly only took a few days and 14 people participated in it; the burlap was sewn by seamstresses from Granada, while the stones are "borrowed".
Studios from Chile, Denmark, China, Germany and Spain participated this year in the contest. The jury, chaired by Iñaqui Carnicero, General Director of Agenda Urbana y Arquitectura, was made up of Lesley Lokko, Curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale; Sol Candela, director of the Arquia Foundation; Carmen Moreno, professor at the Superior Technical School of Architecture of Granada; Inês Lobo, professor at the Autonomous University of Lisbon and ISCTE; José Vallejo, Cultural Coordinator of the Granada City Council, and Javier Peña, Artistic Director of the event.
"AIRE" by P + S Estudio de Arquitectura. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal (Rocío Romero + Miguel de Guzmán) + Javier Callejas.
A young festival
Iñaki Carnicero, main promoter of the Tac! festival, says that he spent a long time regretting that in Spain there were no festivals of young architecture such as the Young Architect Program of Moma PS1 in New York; «I wanted Spanish architects to have that opportunity». The traditional work by the architect has changed, he explains, «today architects are social agents, they collaborate with other disciplines», and even «the architecture faculties of our country are reinventing themselves».
Society will also be rewarded with initiatives like this one. Especially if, as Sol Candela assures, young people are more aware of the need for sustainable architecture. But also because architecture is necessarily linked to the climate problem, "you have to count on young architects for what will be done in future cities", as Carnicero said.
"AIRE" by P + S Estudio de Arquitectura. Photograph by Pablo Roldan.
"AIRE" by P + S Estudio de Arquitectura. Photograph by Pablo Roldan.
A new architect profile?
It would seem that a new type of architect is emerging. A professional who is distinguished by high ecological awareness, the ability (and even the habit) of working with few resources, and a formal vision reminiscent of the Brutalism of the 1950s, characterized by showing the constructive elements of buildings.
For example, the words of Francisco and Laura, winners of the Tac contest! Festival of urban architecture, maintain that the beauty of a building must be "the result of the materials" and advocate "the honesty of the material". Furthermore, the P+S architects avoid any treatment of the material, which by changing naturally "introduces the time variable into the project". Indeed, the «Air» pavilion is made up of an exoskeleton where the scaffolding, which normally disappears in the construction process, forms part of the final state of the work. On the other hand, the artistic gestures of the project are reduced to the reflection of the scaffolding on the burlap during the day and to the “landmark character” or “lamp” that the enclosure acquires at night.
An identical "neo-brutalist" spirit prevails among the 23 proposals that the jury has selected from among the 95 participants for the Tac! Pavilion Competition Exhibition, which can be visited at the Higher Technical School of Architecture in Granada. Most of the projects resort to material nudity, and only two of the selected ideas ("Emergency Door" and "Big John") use colour. Curiously, the jury has valued a formal element: the verticality of the winning pavilion, which, according to Carmen Moreno, contrasts with the horizontality of the activities that are usually held in the square.
Another typical trait of the new architect is an environmental concern. This Saturday, the pavilion was the scene of a round table among the finalists of the contest, a talk that largely revolved around the sustainability of the proposals. Thus, for example, the winners of the contest took into account "the impact of waste" and decided on "global elements" such as scaffolding, rented from companies in the area, and "local elements" such as burlap, which could be reused, or like the stones, which will return to the Sierra Elvira quarry once the festival is over.
Among the finalists, the same trend can be seen: the «Big John» project proposed an enclosure made up of a network of folding chairs that citizens can take with them, so that «the pavilion enters their homes». "Emergency Door" poses a meeting point between the Darro River, the Genil, the city and La Vega, while "Active Poplar" explores the "bioclimatic" possibilities of the poplars. For its part, the "4GU45" project, which won third prize, incorporates the vegetation of La Vega de Granada into the urban space to "grow the city" and "vindicate the agricultural landscape". The trees used for the pavilion, the authors clarified, would be replanted. Also "La casa del aire", second prize, uses recycled material.
Growing up in the midst of economic, ecological and social crises, today's architect is a born economizer. And this is to the point that the award-winning pavilion is in this first edition of Tac! It is a hymn to savings: according to P+S, the assembly only took a few days and 14 people participated in it; the burlap was sewn by seamstresses from Granada, while the stones are "borrowed".
The winners insisted that “a lot can be done with little in architecture”.
"AIRE" by P + S Estudio de Arquitectura. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal (Rocío Romero + Miguel de Guzmán) + Javier Callejas.
This new role of the architect is also marked by a certain predisposition to «humility». In the debate on Saturday, the authors of «4GU45» stated that «more than a building, we wanted to make an intervention, dilute the project». During the talk, the possibilities of non-intervention by the architect were discussed, and the French studio Lacaton & Vassal was reminded, which in 1996 recommended avoiding any intervention in the Place Léon Aucoc in Bordeaux.
The imperfect, the unfinished, the precarious, and even the contingent, seem logical in an architecture condemned to a world marked by the scarcity of resources. P+S architects did not want to paint the scaffolding to "maintain the beauty of the imperfect". In addition, his project seeks to "open architecture to the indeterminate, to spontaneous appropriation, to chance." The name of the pavilion ("Aire") highlights the "contained air" that is every building, and materializes "an idea of the fragile". Spaces as precarious and nomadic as the circus or the Jaima were part of the investigation of the pair of architects.
Sustainability as innovation
It is known that the desire for experimentation has been fundamental in Western architecture. Suffice it to mention experiences such as those of Le Corbusier, Sant'Elia, the Bauhaus, the deconstructed architecture of Peter Eisenman and even such bold approaches as those of Hundertwasser, defender of the "window right".
Is everything made up? To this question, Iñaki Carnicero answers that "what allows innovation is that society changes", and that these changes "produce different solutions: today, for example, we talk about the life cycle of materials". According to this, sensitivity towards the climate would become an innovation strategy in the field of architecture.
In any experimentation, exploration plays an important role. Everything indicates that this has also been taken into account at Tac!, the urban architecture festival, starting with the winning studio, which understands the exercise of architecture as a "continuous research process", and going through the competition, which according to Sol Candela wants "the city to be a classroom". Let's stay, then, with that architecture that has the vocation of being a field of learning as valuable for citizens as for architects.
