Carme Pinós: Escenarios para la vida
ICO Museum 2021
Carme Pinós. Escenarios para la vida —Scenes for Life— It is a journey through the architecture of Carme Pinós, one of the leading figures in contemporary Spanish architecture, in her first retrospective curated by Luis Fernández-Galiano
Carme Pinós began her career in the 1980’s alongside Enric Miralles, a period that is the focus of the first part of the exhibition, showcasing eight projects executed collaboratively.
Arguably, this initial phase is the most widely recognized in the media, yet it is not the most substantial in Pinós’s career. The ICO Museum, steadfast in its commitment to the vast, and at times unknown, richness of Spanish architecture, aims with this exhibition to highlight the career and figure of Carme Pinós itself. This includes the establishment, in 1991, of Estudio Carme Pinós, still active to this day. The second, more extensive part of the exhibit is dedicated to this fruitful period, featuring 80 projects undertaken by Estudio Carme Pinós over these thirty years of activity. A third and final section showcases Pinós’s library and narrates the importance of books in both her professional and personal projects.
Carme Pinós’s architecture is diverse, tailored to each individual project, yet with a common foundation: the importance of context and environment on which this architecture is built. As she herself explains, architecture constructs landscape or constructs city; it is not a sculpture. With each urban intervention, we must have the purpose of creating a city, the purpose of dignifying our surroundings. When I work, I consider that my intervention ultimately aims to enhance, beautify the context. This steadfast belief in the need to embrace the environment, whether natural or urban, is evident in all her works, including notable projects such as CaixaForum Zaragoza (2014), the Mexican Cube Offices Towers (2005/2014), or the Barcelona Massana School of Art and Design (2017).
Exhibition Catalog
Carme Pinós. Escenarios para la vida. 88+8
VV.AA.
Madrid, ed. Arquitectura Viva y Fundación ICO, 2021
Edited by Arquitectura Viva in collaboration with the ICO Foundation, Carme Pinós. Escenarios para la Vida reviews the career of the Barcelona-based architect. It begins with the eight works she co-signed with Enric Miralles, including the Igualada Cemetery, the Morella school-home, and the Huesca Sports Palace. The catalog then explores eighty subsequent works and projects developed with her studio since 1991, featuring significant buildings such as the CaixaForum in Zaragoza, the Cube towers in Guadalajara (Mexico), and interventions in La Gardunya Square in Barcelona, including the iconic Massana School of Art and Design.
Bound in cloth and hardcover, with 240 pages and bilingual Spanish-English edition, the catalog not only includes the introductory text by Luis Fernández-Galiano —the exhibition curator—, but also an interview by Izaskun Chinchilla. In this interview, Pinós reveals her concern for the context, emphasizing, «Architecture constructs landscape or constructs city: it is not a sculpture. With every urban intervention, we must have the purpose of making a city, the purpose of dignifying our environment.»
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Editorial Arquitectura Viva