The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, as a result of the reflection on its own working and with a sensitive attitude towards the evolution of the public twenty-five years after the inauguration, has identified the convenience of assigning certain spaces to informal activities for the spontaneous approach of visitors to art and to the institution. Spaces for resting, learning and creating which here are identified as ‘socializing creative spaces’.

The materialization of the hybrid ‘socializing creative spaces’ we proposed is associated with the playful display of the folies from the eighteen-century gardens.

This interest in the folie, beyond the specific formal archetype, is found in its condition as a family: as a set of singularities that, in addition to its functional value, that due to its arrangement, succession and scale endorses the articulation of the garden, enriching the routes and enhancing it’s use and enjoyment. When the visitor comes across a folie, the scale is altered and thus this perceptive distortion makes it possible to reorient the route within the broader and overall context of the whole-garden.

From this approach, we have worked on the development of multiple units for various spaces identified as optimal for meeting within the museum open circulation.

photograph: Museo Guggemgeim Bilbao

‘Inhabiting Change' is the main exhibition of the fourth edition of the Basque Country International Architecture Biennial Mugak/. It is a choral reflection of works produced by renowned architects and artists. It establishes a collective dialogue between them, through original pieces, representations of their practices and projects around the motto of this edition, 'rebuild, reinhabit, rethink'.

The works are grouped together in the three rooms of the Basque Country Institute of Architecture, each representing one of these three key concepts in this edition. Curated by the Bilbao architect María Arana, also curator of the fourth Mugak/ Biennial, the exhibition 'Inhabiting Change' brings together the works of the 'pritzker' Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, co-founders and partners of the Chinese studio Amateur Architecture Studio; the researcher Beatriz Colomina along with Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna Maria Meister; the Madrid studio amid.cero9; the artist Isaac Cordal; the architect José María Torres Nadal; the Bilbao studio Acha Zaballa Arquitectos; the architect Marina Otero together with Katía Truijen, René Boer and María Mazzanti; and the Barcelona studio TAKK.

Cristina Acha & Miguel Zaballa will be lecturing at the School of Architecture University of the Basque Country next October 20th

The Official College of Basque-Navarrese Architects of Álava approaches the “new ways of living” with its ‘Creation Days. City. Scenery’. A conference that will come from the hand of several architecture studios that “will present innovative projects from the constructive, social and sustainable point of view”.

Acha Zaballa studio will exhibit ‘Lof Study House’, an initiative of the Basque Government’s Department of Housing to adapt premises on the ground floor in homes. The first homes have already been completed and are located in the Bilbao neighborhood of Santutxu.

 

Next Friday May the 6th we will be giving a talk at the School of Architecture of the Sapienza Università di Roma, invited by the Departamento di Architettura e Progetto

Thanks to @architetturasapienzaroma #DIAP and Caterina Padoa Schioppa for the invitation.

We are very honored by Caterina Padoa Schioppa’s words about our work and her dissection of our approaches.Thank you very much Antonio Carbone editor!!

The monograph includes several projects from our previous trajectory as @acha_zaballa (100.60 apartment, Mixtape apartment, Residential building in Sestao, Hospedery in Herrera del Duque, Primary school in Igorre, and Kindergarten Altzaga)

As well as the Bear architects’ herriko plaza project.

It also compiles the projects carried out under @azab_architects association, the Ready-made apartment reform, Txorisolo house, as well as the projects (Eibho headquarters, 35+5 social housing in the historic center of Badajoz and the Europan España exhibition) that continue their course under @acha_zaballa