Barozzi Veiga . + České Budějovice House of Art
For its penultimate exhibition of the year, the Gallery of Contemporary Art and Architecture – České Budějovice House of Art presents On Continuity by Barcelona architecture studio Barozzi Veiga.
The central theme of Veiga’s work is searching, meaning the search for an appropriate type of architecture and its conditions, limits, and boundaries within the context of the changes that are constantly happening as a result of developments in the architecture and in society.
Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga founded Barozzi Veiga in Barcelona in 2004. Since then, they have worked internationally in the field of public and private projects and have received numerous prestigious awards, including the Ajac Young Catalan Architect Award (2007), the Barbara Cappochin International Architecture Award (2011), and most importantly the Gold Medal for Italian Architecture for the Best Debut Work (2012) for the Ribera del Duero Headquarters. The studio is also the recipient of the Young Talent of Italian Architecture Award (2013), the Design Vanguard Award (2014), the Fad International Award (2015), and the Life in Architecture Award (2015), and they were nominated for the Iakov Chernikhov International Prize (2008), Design of the Year (2015), the Fad Award (2018), and the International Swiss Architectural Award (2018). In 2015, their project for a philharmonic in Szczecin earned the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture, and in 2018 their plans for a Museum of Art in Chur, Switzerland, was given the RIBA Award for International Excellence. The studio has also been active in the Czech Republic, where it recently took second place in the competition for the Vltava Philharmonic.
Barozzi Veiga can with some exaggeration be called a studio of nomads – not in terms of a constantly shifting office, but because of its range of activities: one characteristic of Barozzi and Veiga’s work is that they work all over the world, but not where they live. And they are fully aware of what such “activity” entails: the dangers springing from an unfamiliarity with a place and the need to come to terms with many different changes and ways of working. They nevertheless have shown that, with their designs and sets of values, they are capable of working with a particular locality and its various contexts and sensitively responding to and respecting the memory of the place in question. Their projects tend to be rooted in the place and are characterized by a strong emotional resonance and the ability to create an atmosphere.
Barozzi Veiga’s first monographic exhibition in the Czech Republic, On Continuity, presents a series of completed project or projects under construction. It highlights the central themes that characterize their work by using drawings, photographs, and models to narrate the conceptual aspects and constructional reality of each project.
Working in continuity with what already exists, the presence of the right tone that allows the project to become a part of the local context both in consolidated environments and ephemeral or natural landscapes, the search for a certain sense of permanence – these are the main questions that form the basis for the exhibited projects, all of which are infused with a desire to create civic and public architecture in which the architectural object becomes almost a simple frame for a central collective space.
In 2022, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König published a monograph on Barozzi Veiga, which is included in our exhibition.
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BAROZZI VEIGA – On Continuity
Gallery of Contemporary Art and Architecture – České Budějovice House of Art
Exhibition opening: Thursday 13 October 2022 at 6pm
The opening includes a talk by the architects
Exhibition dates: 14 October – 13 November 2022
Curator – Michal Škoda
