MUT Design’s Pavilion for World Design Capital Valencia Honours Traditional Crafts.

Valencia has been designated the World Design Capital of 2022. The culturally vibrant city has a long-standing legacy of design that can be seen reflected in the city’s impressive mix of historic and modern structures.

As an appetiser for what’s to come in the WDC 2022, MUT Design has been commissioned to produce ‘Valencia Pavilion’ – a space that acts as a meeting point for the past and future of Valencian design.

Drawing on the culture and tradition of their homeland, the studio’s work celebrates these origins while expressing them in radically modern and avant-garde forms.

The pavilion nourishes Valencia’s long-standing constructive heritage and artisanal legacy while opening a window on what’s to come. Taking a basic geometric shape, the cylinder and splitting it into two identical halves form the basis for their modular pavilions. Working together or separately, these semicylinders have infinite compositions and a unique personality.

The concept of a travelling exhibition allows the designers to create one of a kind experiences in each of the places it visits. “Every showing will have its very own, well-defined character and it will be singled out from the previous one”, points out co-founder and designer of MUT, Alberto Sánchez.

The pavilions are made up of 300,000 individually handmade strips of wood (14, 16 and 18 centimetres long), like overlapping scales on wooden stretches. Following a curved line, a hallmark of MUT’s designs, the structures generate a labyrinth space full of caves, corridors and cul de sacs that unravel as the visitors walk around them. Audiovisual and digital formats facilitate the story of the present and future of the industrial and design network in Valencia.

In the words of Sánchez, “We want to generate experiences through shapes, light, sounds and different visual impacts. We have focused on creating hypnotic, enveloping sensations thanks to a series of curved elements wrapping up visitors all throughout the Itinerary”.

All the materials are 100% sustainably sourced, local and recycled. MUT worked closely with the Fallas builder, artist Manolo Garcia an “expert in wood” to bring together tradition and the avant-garde to design something that is deeply rooted in the city of Valencia.

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[Images courtesy of MUT Design.]