CCX221270-7.5. Caterina Miralles
This exhibition at FUGA gallery takes place in Barcelona during the year of the World Capital of Architecture 2026 and aims to inscribe itself, albeit tangentially, within this broader discursive context surrounding architecture. Drawing on the theory of architect Gottfried Semper, who located the origin of the architectural wall in the textile gesture —in the earliest screens made of mats, fibres or fabrics that defined space— the proposal introduces fabric as a counterpoint to the accelerated rhythms of contemporary production.
The project explores Concrete Canvas as a contemporary form of hardened fabric. This material, originally developed in 2004 as a system for constructing emergency shelters and temporary infrastructure in contexts of humanitarian and climate crisis, consists of a fabric impregnated with cement which, once hydrated, hardens and acquires structural properties. However, as is often the case with technical construction materials, the market has displaced and distorted this initial use, progressively integrating it into construction processes linked to efficiency and the speed of terraforming industrial structures such as tunnels, ditch linings and slope protection.
At the moment of setting, the concrete sheet transitions from a flexible, adaptable state to a rigid, permanent structure. This liminal moment —when the material ceases to be fluid and takes form— becomes the focus of the research: a moment of transition in which the material still retains the memory of fabric, yet already begins to behave as architecture.
In this context, the project introduces embroidery as a material and temporal counterpoint to this process. While the concrete canvas responds to a logic of rapid and efficient construction, embroidery introduces a slow, manual and cumulative gesture. The interweaving of both techniques brings together two opposing temporalities: the speed of industrial construction systems and the slowness of craft-based work.
The material research stems from a technical uncertainty: it is still unclear which threads or materials will be used for the embroidery on the concrete canvas. This experimentation forms part of the research process itself, which proposes thinking of architecture not only as a discipline of design or representation, but as a set of material processes that shape the speed with which we produce and inhabit built space.
Although the exhibition takes place in Barcelona, the issues raised by the project are shared by other cities: constant processes of transformation, urban economies increasingly tied to real estate value, and an architecture often caught between accelerated production and the need to generate identity. In this context, Barcelona can be understood as a particular variation of what Rem Koolhaas described as the “generic city”: an urban territory in constant transformation where space is produced, consumed and rewritten without ever fully stopping.
The project thus raises an open question: how can we rethink construction systems, material temporalities and economies that currently determine the production of architecture?
