DESIGN, Architecture & Gastronomy
Inhabit the common
At Swab 2025, architecture and design transcend their condition as mere support to assert themselves as active cultural agents, capable of shaping the ways we inhabit, imagine, and share space. The fair proposes a territory of disciplinary convergence, where spatial practices intertwine with artistic ones to rehearse new forms of community.
This edition emphasizes two complementary lines: on the one hand, the exploration of the identity of local design; on the other, research around sustainable architectural practices, articulated within the framework of Polar & Tropic. The different areas of the fair are conceived as devices for dialogue between artistic proposals and the spaces that contain them, inviting projects to activate, challenge, and reconfigure their contexts.
Architectural Aid Agency (AAA), led by Remi Groenendijk (The Hague) together with David Velu (Rotterdam) and Mañana Carpintería (Barcelona), participates in Polar & Tropic with a modular pavilion built from recycled and artisanal materials. This project stems from a previous collaboration with Jatiwangi Art Factory (JAFF) —co-curators of the section— and proposes architecture as a practice of care, pause (langsam), and ecological resilience.
JAFF works critically with the earth and defends the traditional terracotta industry, creating networks between local production and artisanal memory. In dialogue with this vision, the proposal connects with the region’s traditional kilns, which also fight to keep artisanal work and the transmission of ceramic knowledge alive.
In this intersection of traditions and materialities, the NONKRONG-SAUNA installation will integrate the work of the Forn d’Obra Duran and Bòbila Águila, articulating a communal space that evokes both Indonesian gatherings (nongkrong) and the ritual dimension of Nordic saunas. Within the framework of Polar & Tropic, this pavilion is activated as a place for meeting, exchange, and dialogue, fostering an ecosystem for shared learning and the creation of new collaborations.
Within the framework of this transcendence of architecture and design as active cultural agents in the pursuit of a shared space, the gallery VASTO, in collaboration with Project Lobster, presents Resting Field, by the artist NakedSpace, in the General program plaza. This eight-meter inflatable installation transforms the stand into a shared landscape where one can rest, gather, and share experiences. Each hollow on its surface functions as an informal seat —unspecified, intuitive, and egalitarian—. Without front or center, without elevated positions or fixed roles, the piece avoids hierarchy and spectacle, proposing instead a communal topology shaped by presence and proximity. Light glides softly over its membrane, generating silent gradients that change with time and movement, reinforcing its dimension as a space for encounter, exchange, and care.
These proposals highlight how design and architecture can act as tools for relationships: spatial devices that not only shape forms but also generate structures for coexistence. By placing the body at the center of the experience, they open a shared ground where inhabiting the space is, at the same time, building community.
picnic.lab
Coffee, beer, or food are moments of shared rituals: everyday gestures that create bonds and foster encounters.
PicnicLab emerges from the Mediterranean essence: a culture of gathering around these rituals and the shared table, where conversation, pause, and taste are everyday forms of connection. It draws from this deeply rooted tradition to transform it into a laboratory, where what is inherited becomes material for innovation and gastronomy intertwines with collective experience to imagine new forms of community.
The name of the space stems from the idea of the picnic as a gesture of sociability: a practice that brings bodies together around food and shared time, where the domestic becomes collective and the space is built spontaneously. This horizontal format, without hierarchies, becomes a starting point for new investigations: transforming that common place into a laboratory where gastronomy is activated as a tool for creation and encounter.
The structure of the space is articulated through picnic tables joined as a community, forming the concept of “a single table.” This arrangement proposes a continuous space for meeting and conversation, where all everyday gestures are shared and perceived as part of a collective process. Its simplicity and familiarity allow the environment to be experienced as open, flexible, and welcoming, fostering interaction and shared experience.
Nømad Coffee and Águila activate in this device the popular rituals of our culture: everyday gestures of sociability where friends and families gather around coffee or beer, transforming these moments into collective experiences of encounter and conversation. Tiberi Club extends this logic from the kitchen: drawing from Mediterranean tradition, local products, popular recipes, and the temporality of the shared table, to transform them through an experimental lens. Their work turns the kitchen into a social laboratory where encounter is as central as flavor, and each dish is conceived as an edible microarchitecture linking memory and contemporaneity in constant dialogue with the collective experience. In PicnicLab, this pursuit expands as a living practice of renewal: making what is inherited the material through which to imagine new forms of community.
con el apoyo de:
