Internalities

Internalities is an exhibition at La Casa de la Arquitectura, in the Arquería de Nuevos Ministerios, bringing together the proposal with which Spain took part in the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. It examines how contemporary construction can reduce its environmental footprint.

The exhibition poses a fundamental question: what changes in a building when it is constructed with nearby materials, renewable resources and techniques that generate fewer emissions. Its route begins with an installation titled Balance, in which sixteen recent building and landscape projects, designed by studios from the Iberian Peninsula, are presented through pairs of scale models placed at either end of a balance. One of them recreates the natural environment from which the raw material comes; the other shows the construction details of each project.

The following rooms explore five technical themes: materials, energy, trades, waste and emissions. Here, floor-based installations are combined with large-format photographic series on the walls, the work of several teams of architects and photographers. The whole follows the life cycle of buildings in the Peninsula, from extraction in forests or quarries to final assembly and, eventually, deconstruction.