There's always great excitement when a new landmark is added to a city as the skyline mutates and the city is radically transformed by the activities carried out in the new building and by the people who populate it.
Designed by famous architects Jean Nouvel and Fermín Vázquez, Torre Glòries is one of the most emblematic buildings of Barcelona. Located in the city's technology district and inaugurated in 2005, the 144-metre-high building was renovated and redesigned in 2017.
There is now a new addition in the skyscraper, the Mirador Torre Glòries (opening on 20th May). Conceived as a new cultural, multi-disciplinary and entertainment landmark, the Mirador began to take shape five years ago, as a way to offer locals and visitors a platform to discover the city from the building.
The Mirador is indeed an observation platform with three different installations - Hyperview Barcelona, The Observation Deck and Cloud Cities by Tomás Saraceno - conceived as three architectural adventures through the city.
Hyperview allows to discover the city through art, science and technology. Located on the basement floor of the building, this installation is divided in different sections - Prologue, Barcelonians, Atmospheres, Rhythms and Sirena. None of them allows visitors to see the actual city, but they are designed as pieces of a larger puzzle. These sections contain indeed sounds, rhythms, noises and moods that invite people to put their finger on the pulse of the city and feel its beating heart.
Prologue acts as an introduction, a tuner to the city; Barcelonians is instead a non-anthropocentric installation, a forest of 132 delicate folded-paper sculptures by Joan Sallas representing a variety of vegetable and animal species including hedgehogs, fungi, waterlilies, jellyfish and fin whales living around the city.
Atmospheres invites viewers to discover the sky, wind, sea and sounds of the city through real-time data, while Rhythms looks at the city as if it were an organism and explores its metabolic processes. Last but not least, Sirena offers a soundtrack to Barcelona, interpreted and set to music by Maria Arnal and John Talabot.
The most interesting thing about these installations is the fact that they are unique and unrepeatable because they are generated automatically, using real-time data of the city harvested from sensors and instruments recording a variety of information.
In this way, you get the feeling that the city is constantly changing and transforming, through its systems and infrastructures, urban technologies and ecosystems. The music in Sirena, for example, mutates every day according to the wind speed, weather, phases of the moon, sea temperature and level of particles in the air.
The Observation Deck, on the 30th floor, offers a 360° view over Barcelona at a height of 125 metres: this space is where the information viewers received in the first installation can be matched with the landscape. Here it is possible to admire the mountains and the coastline, the Sagrada Família and the most modern part of the city, the 22@ innovation district, representing 21st-century Barcelona.
In the same space, there's a special multi-sensory walk-in art installation, Cloud Cities, by contemporary Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno. The artist is known for his works suspended between art, architecture, technology and science, and for his studies about spiders that led him to the creation of the Arachnophilia platform.
As the title suggests, the installation in Barcelona is a sort of cloud formed by a series of pentagons and hexagons, creating 113 cloud spaces, made of 5000 nodes connecting 6 km of tensile cables.
The configuration is similar to the "Aero(s)cene" installation Saraceno did in the Gaggiandre area of the Arsenale at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice and that comprised 36 clouds, cluster-like structures inspired by the Weaire-Phelan geometry of aggregating foam and soap bubbles.
The geometrical elements form hidden nests where visitors can sit down and, suspended from a vantage point, ponder about the future of the cities from an environmental perspective, consider worldwide challenges going from wars to global pandemics, social justice and the modern plague of misinformation, or take a break choosing from the books on offer.
Saraceno's first permanent interactive sculpture in southern Europe, Cloud Cities is indeed a way to engage in collective critical reflections and activate zones of emergence, disrupting the rigid verticality of the skyscraper and offering alternative geometries of togetherness, to rediscover the power of the collective after Covid-19 and social distancing.
"For millennia, humans have looked to the clouds and the behaviours of plants and animals to predict collective futures, finding messages hidden in their changing shapes and habits. Yet, in the context of the Capitalocene, the knowledge of entire ecosystems is being threatened and clouds are disappearing, replaced by toxic plumes of pollution and digital misinformation," Saraceno states about the inspiration behind his work, wondering, "Can an observatory in the 21st century, with its distant gaze, sense within and imagine something other than clouds in the shape of castles in the sky?"
Image credits for this post
1 - 3. Courtesy Mirador Torre Glòries. Photography Mirador Torre Glòries
4 - 10. Tomás Saraceno, Installation views of Cloud Cities Barcelona, 2022. Courtesy Studio Tomás Saraceno and Mirador Torre Glòries. Photography Studio Tomás Saraceno © Tomás Saraceno
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