The icons of modern architecture, works of best architects and design studios across Europe, designs that have permanently changed the face of today’s cities. More than 3,000 such buildings were presented during the Made in Europe exhibition inaugurating the program of the European Capital of Culture Wroclaw 2016.
Made in Europe was a unique story about the last 25 years of European architecture. The exhibition sumed up the history of the Mies van der Rohe Award, the European Union’s most important prize in the field of contemporary architecture, awarded since 1988 by the Mies van der Rohe Foundation in Barcelona. In this competition there are no limits to the scale or function of a structure. From the great architectural guidelines to small projects - all previous editions have taken into account private houses, public buildings, museums and cultural institutions, sports facilities, education and health care facilities, as well as large-scale infrastructure projects and transport systems. Their common denominator is that they all contribute to shaping the cities and are a proof of the important contribution of European professionals in the development of the latest architectural solutions, technology and ecology.
The exhibition impressively juxtaposed close to 150 models of buildings awarded with the main prize, a special prize for young architects and structures entered in the so-called “short list” qualifying for the finals, as well as visualizations of about 3,000 projects submitted for the award since 1988. Among them are such well-known objects as the famous Waterloo railway station in London designed by Nicolas Grimshaw & Partners design studio and awarded with the main prize in 1994, the characteristic cylindrical body of the London skyscraper 30 St Mary Axe designed by Norman Foster, which reached the final in 2005’s edition, the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art MUSAC – a project of Mansilla + Tunon Arquitectos team awarded the main prize in 2007, an innovative building of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet in Oslo, designed by Snohetta office and awarded in 2009 or the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik - awarded in 2013 Henning Larsen Architects design. Among the models there were two Polish projects which qualified for the final group in 2013 – the reinforced concrete tram-train station at the Municipal Stadium in Wroclaw, designed by Zbigniew Maćków (Maćków Design Studio), as well as the Scientific Information Centre and Academic Library in Katowice by the Koszalin studio HS99.
All the works nominated for the competition over the past 25 years were presented in the form of project documentation organized in an extensive database - sketches, photographs, plans, maps and information on 160 meters of fabric mounted on a metal structure. The exhibition was accompanied by films made by the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, which constitute a kind of a media guide for the exhibition: they show the process of its creation, selection of materials in the foundation’s archives and the concept of timeline presentation, on which all the projects are positioned. The presentation was complemented by interviews with the winners of the main and special prizes, organizers’ speeches and a statistical summary of the geographical distribution of all the submitted projects.
Made in Europe was one of the main events of the opening weekend of the European Capital of Culture Wrocław 2016 (15 - 17 January 2016). A part of the Wroclaw’s edition of Made in Europe was the presentation of the “European Identity” project - an attempt to answer the question about the identity of European architecture.
