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Anthony Vidler. Towards Superarchitettura
In collaboration with Aldo van Eyck and later with lyricists and situationists, Constant worked for a number years imagining architecture and urbanism that would respond to the physical and functional needs of the environment, based on the gypsy camps and migrant communities in post-industrial society. New Babylon remains an intense humanist experiment between a broad group of visionary projects by artists and architects involved in the revolt against alienating and monotonous environments in post-war reconstruction. Some these projects were utopian, for instance Nicolas Schöffer’s Cybernetic City, Mobile Architecture by Yona Friedman, the Mobile City by Iannis Xenakis and Archigram’s Plug-in City; while others were dystopian, such as Archizoom’s No-Stop City, or the Continuous Monument by Superstudio. Some, however, were part of the call by critic Reyner Banham to “invent ‘other’ architecture”. Today we can see the impact of these visions on divergent architects like Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi and Leon Krier, yet no contemporary architect has opened up a space quite like Constant’s.
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José Miguel de Prada Poole, José Pérez de Lama, Izaskun Chinchilla and Ethel Baraona. Another City for Another Life
New Babylon responded to the pressing need to find urgent answers to mass and global urban growth, in addition to tackling the logic of alignment and privatisation in the contemporary city. This round-table discussion, which takes its title from a text by Constant, brings together four architects that have addressed these challenges in different ways: José Miguel de Prada Poole, through the city that instantly took shape in the ephemeral mega-structures of leisure in the 1968 environment; José Pérez de Lama, with the overflow of architecture into the convergence of digital technology, new social movements and urban territory; and Izaskun Chinchilla’s concept of organic prototypes and mechanisms conceived through play and participation. The table will be moderated by editor and critic Ethel Baraona.
![Constant. New Babylon Nord [Nueva Babilonia norte], (detalle). Plano, 1958 © Constant, VEGAP, Madrid, 2016](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/babylon.jpg.webp)
Held on 17 Feb 2016
New Babylon (1956–1974) is a networked city project conceived by the Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys for the “total fulfilment of life”, an approach to urbanism based on the freedom of the individual through the power of play and creativity. This activity, which marks the end of the retrospective in the Museo devoted to Constant, examines this total artwork’s place in the utopian urbanism that followed World War Two through a lecture by Anthony Vidler and a round-table discussion featuring participation from José Miguel de Prada Poole, Izaskun Chinchilla, José Pérez de Lama and Ethel Baraona.
In the lapse of almost half a century since this last great utopia of European art – outlined by Constant in maquettes, photomontages, planimeters and films - numerous questions still arise, and aim to be addressed in this activity: Where is Constant’s place in the post-war urbanism related to contemporary proposals such as those from the Independent Group, Yona Friedman and Le Corbusier, among others? What is the flipside today, and how can it keep up its ability to break ground in an age when technological networks are paradoxically inseparable from the more sophisticated forms of control and nomadism is associated with uncertainty as a class condition?
In collaboration with
The Netherlands Embassy, COAM and Fundación COAM
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
Participants
Ethel Baraona. Editor, critic and curator. Together with César Reyes, she is the co-founder of dpr-barcelona, a research studio and independent publishers, and editor of Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme.
Izaskun Chinchilla. Architect. Since 2001 she has directed her own studio, Izaskun Chinchilla Arquitectos, and her work has received awards at various international conferences and competitions. In 2014 she won the competition City of Dreams for her pavilion design in Governors Island (New York), which used recycled material and was built collectively. She is also a professor and researcher at Bartlett School (University College London).
José Pérez de Lama. Architect and professor at the Higher Technical School of Architecture at the University of Seville. Between 2001 and 2011 he was part of the group hackitectura.net (together with Sergio Moreno and Pablo de Soto). He has published and edited Devenires ciborg. Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Redes de Comunicación (2006), WikiPlaza. Request For Comments (2011) and Yes We Are Open! Fabricación digital, tecnologías y cultura libres (2014).
José Miguel de Prada Poole. Architect and professor of Architectural Design, Industrial Design for Housing and Emergency Architecture at ETSAM (the Polytechnic University of Madrid). In 1975 he won the National Architecture award, and was also a researcher at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and visiting professor at the MIT in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA) between 1980 and 1982. In 1968 he devised the Ciudad instantánea (Instant City) in Ibiza and in 1972 the space for the Pamplona Encounters.
Anthony Vidler. Architectural historian and theorist. He is dean and professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture (2002–2012), and visiting professor at Yale and Princeton Universities, among numerous others. His publications include Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (2011), Architecture between Spectacle and Use (2008), Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992) and The Writing of the Walls. Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987).
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Exile and Alienation
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.