Ambush #6: MAIO Architects

For Ambush #6, MAIO designed an intensive workshop that, over the course of a week, brought together a unique group of participants: artists, architects, designers, students, and researchers from Eina Bosc as well as other universities and creative communities in Barcelona. Integrating performance and speculative architecture, collective experimentation and celebration, MAIO's project proposes the development of an ephemeral construction as a site-specific intervention for Eina Bosc. Under the premise of From A to B, the participants engage in a process of collective research and conceptualization to connect the Eina Bosc building with an adjacent vacant lot; a right-of-way occupied by vegetation and rubble. Through this “third landscape” and its undergrowth, one can walk from Bosc to the old Casa Dolcet, where Eina was founded back in 1967. Activating a space that is symptomatic and fragile, yet essential to the topographical reality of Bosc, MAIO's Ambush poses an exercise in architectural imagination regarding accessibility and the crossing of boundaries, but also regarding play and performative fiction within the Anthropocene landscape. The result was a leap; or, as the workshop itself defined it, “the design of an instant.”

MAIO is an architectural office based in Barcelona that works on spatial systems that allow variation and change through time. MAIO’s projects embrace the changing complexity of everyday life while providing a resilient, compromised and clear architectural response. MAIO’s members combine professional activities with academic, research and editorial ones. They have been in charge of the magazine Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme (2011-16), and currently teach at Columbia GSAPP (New York) and the Architectural Association (London), among other international schools.