Mass is More

For nine days in late September of 2022, the iconic Barcelona Paviliondesigned by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lily Reich in 1929was host to a kind of counterfactual provocation. A new piece of architecture, inserted into the Pavilions garden and peeking over the travertine wall that forms its famous entry court, referred respectfully to the archetypal language of the once-exotic steel, concrete, and stone masterpiece, but was instead constructed entirely from "mass timber," cross-laminated timber panels sourced from regional forests and manufactured in nearby Galicia. The architectural intervention posed a radical alternative to modernisms materiality: renewable, sustainably-sourced, carbon storing bio-fiber that might transform buildingsand one day whole citiesfrom massive sources of greenhouse gas emissions into climate restoring carbon sinks. Underpinned by extensive documentation, the book explores the making of this much-admired symbol of architectural modernity and its material alternative. Mass is More is the first volume in the new book series Bauhaus Earth Manuals, which will explore case studies of sustainable building and planning and its scalability on a planetary level.

Alan Organschi is a principal and partner at Gray Organschi Architecture, an award winning, US based architecture and timber building practice. He currently serves as Director of the Innovation Labs at Bauhaus Earth and is a senior member of the faculty at the Yale School of Architecture where he has taught architectural design and building technology for two decades. Rosa Hanhausen is a Mexican architect and urban designer currently based in Berlin. In 2015 she co-founded a design studio in Mexico City, through which she developed a wide range of projects. She has been assistant curator to exhibitions such as "100 Años de Diseño Suizo"(2017) or "Design for the City" (2018), both commissioned by the Swiss Embassy in Mexico. Among other publications, she co-authored conference papers such as "Post-Fossil Growth Scenarios for Arctic Cities: Full Circle Carbon Recycling in the North of Russia" (2019) and "Hinterlands of Budget Air Travel: Investigating the Journey of Aviation Fuel" (2021). Rosa presently serves as the Innovation LABs Global Network Coordinator at Bauhaus Earth, where she co-developed part of the exhibition Mass is More (2022) at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. Vicente Guallart is a Spanish architect who works in the development of projects for ecological cities and buildings across the globe. He is co-director of Urbanitree and was chief architect of the city of Barcelona from 2011 to 2015. He also founded the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (2001), where he currently works on the development of Biocities at the Valldaura Labs center. Daniel Ibañez is a Spanish architect, urbanist, and scholar. He holds a Doctor of Design degree fromHarvard University GSD where he has spent the last twelve years studying, researching, and teaching. He currently serves as director of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, is co-founder and director of Urbanitree and senior urban consultant at the World Bank. Bauhaus Earth is a global interdisciplinary initiative of collaborators from science, architecture, engineering, industry, policy, and finance that seeks to transform the building sector from a major source of anthropogenic environmental and social impact into a regenerative and ecologically sensitive means to meet the housing and infrastructural needs of an urbanizing global population.