Fabular Paisatges: Exhibition Design for Museu Habita
The exhibition Fabular Paisatges explores the development of Catalonia’s museum network through a combination of historical artworks and new contemporary interventions centered on one of these institutions’ privileged genres: landscape painting. It takes place in the historic Victoria Eugènia Palace, designed by modernist architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch for the 1929 International Exposition in Montjuïc, Barcelona—an emblematic building now envisioned as part of the future expansion of the neighboring Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
The palace’s vast spaces and untreated surfaces make it an ideal setting for large-scale installations and site-specific practices, yet that same scale and the absence of technical infrastructure render it unsuitable for displaying historical artworks. To enable this coexistence within a limited budget, the exhibition design adapts the venue to the conditions of art viewing while creating sectorized rooms that provide the environmental stability required for historical pieces. In practice, this means building the very conditions of an art institution almost from scratch.
To adapt the venue’s monumental scale to the viewer’s body, ongoing maintenance works—pipe repairs, surface smoothing, and the removal of obsolete communication systems—were used to coat all architectural elements in a uniform ivory tone up to six and a half meters high.
A central infrastructure was assembled with off-the-shelf greenhouse beams and enclosed in white thermal blankets (17 g/m²). This sequence of interconnected rooms also organizes visitors’ circulation within the pavilion’s grid. Bridged between existing columns and a series of centripetal cantilevered walls, these quasi-transparent, paper-thin enclosures create environmentally controlled and surveilled zones while maintaining visual continuity between the historical and contemporary works.
This infrastructure, with its exposed systems and porous boundaries, generates a tension between the artworks inside and those outside, revealing the mechanisms through which cultural institutions construct and preserve value.
CREDITS
Curators: Manuel Borja-Villel, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Beatriz Martínez Hijazo
Architect: Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco
Design team: Irene Domínguez, Inés González Paradela, Sofia Marciel, Sara Pérez Martín, Jaime Torres
Contractor: Central de Projectes Massens S.L.
Client: Departament de Cultura, Generalitat de Catalunya
