PROJECT BB NEON

Madrid, 2017
descarted bricks - neon light

Project BB is based on different ideas and philosophies focused on the ruin and the beauty of the broken and partially destroyed object. On one hand, it has been inspired by the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, in which the imperfection, the ephemeral and the incomplete aspects of the objects are the main reason of their beauty. On the other hand, we have wanted to research and to work with the idea of the ruin, whose presence in the culture and the art of the western world has a fundamental importance. The ruin as an object and as architecture, as thing and as space, has different roles and meanings but all of them have traditionally revolved around the evocation of the past and the symbolization of the passing of time. Recalling the past through the ruins has always provoked a process of “romantification” (voluntary or not), in which the past is seen as a more beautiful and more glorious period than the contemporary times, while the poetic aspect of the ruins has carried to a constant reflection about the passing of time and its inevitability.

Nowadays, although the antique and classic ruins maintain this image in our culture, it has appeared a new part associated with the modern ruin, linked to the consequences of a fierce capitalism, to the extreme consumption and its resulting creation of waste, and to the real estate speculation. The case of Spain is paradigmatic of this dynamic, since the real estate bubble of some years ago left the panorama full of modern ruins that have a completely different sense from the old ones, and that evoke feelings far from this romanticism. In a landscape in which the old ones have been mixed with the new, the ruins are in the south of Europe a common element, with a deep meaning in the culture but with an ambivalent character because of the last years’ course of events.

With Project BB we have wanted to make of the ruin an everyday object of common use, moving its presence in the landscape to the personal territory and making an homage to this usual element that has an ambiguous and changing sense but whose relevance and mark in our culture is permanent.

To make this, we have “incorporated” the ruin to a daily object, a lamp, using bricks and other wasted materials from construction as a small sign of this idea. Relics or wastes, we have watched in them a value and a beauty at the same time artificial and natural: artificial because these materials have been made by the human being; and natural because it has been modified by the course of the time and the nature. In each recovered piece we have discovered a small unique object whose beauty has made it, as we see, involuntarily artistic.

That is why, instead of shaping the materials to adapt them to our design, we have used the same form of the broken materials without modifying them. Doing so, we have designed each piece based on an unexpected form, reinvesting the traditional work method and enjoying a creative process that has let us go deep into the beauty of everyday objects, making unique pieces in which the singularity of the bricks is combined with geometric metal sheets of copper and brass for searching a contrast between the qualities of the materials and the characteristics of the forms.

Project BB has been developed in Brooklyn and in Madrid, and is currently working to continue this process adapting the created objects to the different types of found material, following always the same philosophy and methodology but transforming the final aesthetic of the objects to adapt itself to the local conditions.