Excerpt: Adlan Exhibition by Midori Arquitectura and IDUS arquitectura is an interior design project for a temporary exhibition space. The placement of the furniture, which is placed parallel to one another and follows the orientation of the ceiling beams, is exactly what divides the space, organises the areas, and forms the exhibition paths that circle the octagonal room in a clockwise manner.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] The commission consisted in designing and building a temporary exhibition with a very small budget. The exhibition features the group of artists and intellectuals called ADLAN (Amics de l’Art Nou – Friends of the new art) which contributed to the introduction of modernity in Barcelona during the Spanish Second Republic, in the thirties. A large number of personal documents from this collective are exhibited, such as self-published magazines, letters and photographs.
It is decided to recover display cases and pieces of furniture donated by the Picasso Museum from Barcelona, coming from a previous exhibition. These are selected and distributed in the exhibition room to display all the content proposed by the curator of the exhibition, while Miró’s pictorial works are displayed on the walls.
The design of the graphic support echoes this notion of a self-managed collective, and is presented with a simple material such as gray cardboard, bringing up the idea of letter paper, postcards and magazines. Therefore, this cardboard is held vertically by a simple structure made out of birch wood, mirroring the materiality of the reclaimed display cases.
It is precisely the distribution of the exhibition texts, following the directions of the beams in the ceiling, and the position of the furniture located parallel to each other, which organizes the space, separates the areas and creates the exhibition paths in a clockwise fashion around the octagonal room.