With “Entrate”, edited by Martina Muzi, MAXXI has made the most of its lobby by inviting architects to bring the space to life and really engage visitors. Last year, Nacho Carbonell devised an evocative setting at Rome’s Zaha Hadid—planned museum of modern art with Memory, in practice. Taking the baton for the second edition is another Spanish practice: THANKSfounded by Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño in Barcelona, they have created a fantastic atmosphere that is also deeply rooted in the here and now. The architectural duo Me-Living it captures the eponymous atmosphere of friendliness — suggesting how we could and should live together as humans and in relation to nonhuman species.
It begins with an oval cradle-like reception station, crowned with lights and dripping with flowers. Luzárraga and Muiño have rejected the modernist notion that decoration is frivolous and their installation abounds with the flourish seen in some of their earlier works, from flowers woven into surfaces to vegetables as nourishing, cleansing and beautifying interior elements.
“There was a lot of talk about ornament in architecture during modernism,” says Luzárraga. “The excuse was that the ornament attracts dust and disease, but there was something behind it, too: The idea that the ornament was more associated with female work and therefore should be banned. So we also like to work with ornament and with techniques more associated with female work – and with colors less associated with architecture.”
He points to the six-metre-diameter couch—upholstered in pink faux fur—that invites guests to collectively relax and “do nothing.” we live in capitalism but we don’t always it must be productive. In its center hangs a voluminous floral bouquet with calming aromatic properties.
Then there is the tower that supports various species of edible Mediterranean plants in a system of tiered planters that are irrigated from above. when the bounty is ripe, there will be a banquet at the tables below. In this shared harvest, the modern call for food sovereignty nests against ancient ways of living and behaving.
In the “wellness bed”, meanwhile, rest is regulated by both aromatic vegetables and phototherapy.
Water is the life sustaining source. A fountain that TAKK refers to as a “parliament of water” invites guests to climb in for a Jacuzzi experience. Like all the pieces in the installation, it is playful but conveys a serious message: We are interconnected with the natural systems around us, and every impact we make on them has a deeply resonant effect for all species. Luzárraga finds it encouraging that some waterways, like rivers were granted legal rightsnow they have political representation.
For the last Venice Architecture Biennale, TAKK created water parliaments for the Catalan pavilion. “We recognized the importance that water should be understood not as a resource that serves humans, but as a very complex body of relationships with many other bodies,” says Luzárraga. Next year, they will continue this dialogue in an installation on sediments for the World Congress of Architecture.
All setups of the facility consist of lightweight structural systems mounted on wheels for maneuverability. And they are true to the impeccably detailed designs that TAKK started with. “We go from computer to manufacturing, and it’s exactly the same — we design it on the computer, cut it exactly with the CNC mill, and then assemble it.” While the result is aesthetically whimsical, there’s no improvisation here, save for some of the furniture finishes. This is a happy and hopeful setup, but it’s also very serious.
In fact, all of TAKK’s enchanting creations connect the critique of colonialism, modernism, capitalism and anthropocentrism with the embrace of a feminist ethos and the urgency of the climate crisis. “We are always working on this idea of how we should deal with this current crisis of climate change, through exploring the forms of symbiosis between us and the rest of the living entities on the planet,” says Luzárraga. “We are not anthropocentric, but we are moving away from this very anthropocentric, particularly a male-white-European-human perspective in order to establish more democratic contracts between us and the rest of the planet’s living species that are also facing the sixth mass extinction.”
Photo courtesy Jose Chevia and MAXXI.
