Event structure
BIA KLIMA
reGENERATING THE FUTURE. Climate and Energy
Bilbao 11, 12 and 13 December 2024
BIA is Bilbao Bizkaia Architecture the platform that disseminates and promotes Bizkaia architecture emerging from the Delegation in Bizkaia of the Basque-Navarre Institute of Architects.
It pools the experience and expertise both of the sector’s leading companies and small independent studios, all of which have great exportable value.
Internationalisation, pooling experience and citizen participation are the hallmarks of the framework in which architecture and urban planning are the common thread of the actions undertaken.
Structure
INSIGHTS
In a world where the values of environmental rationality and restraint are foreign, and where sustainability or ecology have become words stripped of meaning and are adrift in a sea of green consumption.
BIA seeks to unearth the material realities hidden behind the ideas and trace lines of response in order to take a stand in a climate emergency situation that demands our attention. Beyond this huge task, BIA seeks to explore parallel paths that – from different insights and with a variety of texts or concerns – are fundamental to design effective responses to the climate problem.
Aesthetics and beauty to fix change: what aesthetics are our future demanding? Technical and energy: are bio-based materials our future? How must we approach it from architecture? Does a contradiction not exist between greater material consumption and that being congruent with energy demand?
“Any built architecture is a container of material and knowledge in imperceptible movement”; this beautiful definition by Víctor Navarro encourages to go further into what lies behind the construction. An idea of architecture that is based on its value of idea, material and time. What the relationships are between those three vectors that can determine maverick ways to operate within the capitalist framework.
In conclusion. Society needs answers and the planet needs changes; it is time for architecture to provide answers or at least to provide clarification with the right questions.
ENERGY AND ARCHITECTURE
BIA KLIMA_reGENERATING FUTURE. Climate and Energy gets the first session underway with a technical interdisciplinary insight panel.
Climate and energy have become two of the variables that are going to most impact the way of designing and constructing in the coming years. Social awareness, new regulations, and a business and economic culture that is ever more aware make these key aspects in the regeneration of our built and urban areas.
During these insights on ENERGY AND ARCHITECTURE, different professionals will reflect on and provide key examples of the direction of this current effort to eagerly improve our environment from the different disciplines.
AESTHETICS, ART AND NATURE
BIA KLIMA_reGENERATING FUTURE. Climate and Energy continues on its second day with an insight panel focused on aesthetics, art and nature. The interdisciplinary panel will be led by Iñigo Berasategui and Ane Arce, BEAR.
AESTHETICS, ART AND NATURE. What aesthetics do our future require of us? Reputed artists and professionals will provide a view of how this new vision of nature is materialising in the 21st century-
MEETINGS
BIA is seeking to become an established discussion forum.
Establishing a space – a framework to listen and think – at a time of multiple conference referrals with academic positions focused on bureaucratic accreditation. An attractive, theoretical and complex event, that does not seek fleeting viewpoints, pointless mirages or snapshots, but rather an accurate analysis. A rigorous and thorough theoretical review, and effective, emotive and joyous insights on the inhabitant-planet relationships.
Therefore, open sessions are organised with renowned speakers who will put forward their positions in 40-minute lectures, followed by a further 40 minutes led by a critic who will open up the conversation to the people at the event.
BIA seeks in turn to bolster the position of architecture as an intellectual discipline with social impact. Where the accurate analysis of society and its tangible derivatives is fundamental for correct practical development.
Furthermore, defending the possibilities of architecture is positioned as transformative practice. A pathway towards “learning to inhabit the world” ¹ which challenges the messianic ideas that bear the brunt with the need to unravel the world to reconstruct it while opting for a less invasive and more opportunist model. Inhabiting the world implies reaching out to the everyday, reorganising, completing and demonstrating.
Let’s get started.
1 “Learning to inhabit the world, instead of trying to construct based on a preconceived idea.” Nicolas Bourriaud
explore: THEORY
This first event to get BIA underway seeks to explore the broad and contested meanings of the great terms of today: ecology, sustainability, climate change, and the Anthropocene. We will lay the foundations and discuss which today’s potential escape routes are. BIA will welcome two great thinkers of our time who will use philosophy and urban thought to guide and steer us towards new balance horizons with the planet.
Gabriel Alonso will take us down a dark – and not always pleasant – path to explore together the relations between nature, culture, art and the environment. Keller Easterling will provide us with her realistic view of the contradictions of the world system as the basis for a design strategy for dissensus. As Andrés Jaque explains when talking about the author, she reveals that there is no escape route and operating from within is the only possible response.
Ethel Baraona will then broker and extend a discussion aiming at considering the importance of reality as a foundation for design. Ethel will intertwine the positions, set them down, and build a three-way discussion to enter into unclear and hackneyed concepts with which to redefine ourselves in and with the planet.
think: REACT
Once the field has been marked out, a second line seeks to use architecture to discern answers or reactions towards alternative futures. How to act? How to intervene? What to ask oneself? Where to look?
By ignoring the easy option of presenting work as architectural corpus par excellence, joining the two great theories of current architecture is posited. One from its status as being well-versed in history as a source of knowledge and teaching that minutely examines the theory and serves it to us as the main course. The other from a bold viewpoint, where technology and precise analysis of the material climate realities in terms of architecture provide us with accurate pointers for a necessary redefinition of its objectives and manifestations.
Philippe and Iñaki, two viewpoints from a shared critical position that – from ongoing search and research – incorporate innovation into architecture as scepticism about the easy option, continued estrangement and searching in technology, the climate and material conditions of allies for an architecture of the present for the here-and-now and tomorrow.
Moisés Puente, the editor of both, will pave the way to move forward together or dissenting by seeking to expand their exposés. How must climate and architecture respond? What lessons should be drawn from history, ranging from material viewpoints to environmental insights?