“Verd botella”, the installation created by UIC Barcelona School of Architecture for the fifth edition of the Llum BCN Festival held last weekend won First Ex Aequo Prize as part of a project entitled “Reflexió” created in conjunction with BAU Centre Universitari de Disseny of Barcelona. 

The prize, awarded by the Barcelona Culture Institute, is conferred on the best light installations created by schools of art, design, lighting and architecture in Barcelona. The prizegiving ceremony was held on 17 February in the former Simon Factory, in the Poblenou district of Barcelona. 

The “Verd botella” installation was created by 12 UIC Barcelona School of Architecture students, under the supervision of lecturers Iñaki Baquero and Marta Garcia-Orte. 

It is located in the Jardí del Sol in Poblenou, and its aim is to fill the parts of a vertical garden that had not yet been filled by vegetation with the colour green, in a symbolic way.  To do so, they used more than a thousand recycled plastic bottles, which were painted green and lit inside with low-energy Christmas lights. The students highlighted the fact that “Recycling is one of the main cornerstones of the project, since it was originally envisioned as an awareness campaign to attract attention to the amount of single-use plastic we generate. It is a reflection on the importance of our actions in terms of the preservation of the environment”.  

The international jury members for the awards included Anna Díaz, a visual artist from Hamill Industries studio; Marisol López, a cultural manager and director of the Digital Culture Area in the Catalan Institute for Cultural Companies (ICEC); Olga Subirós, architect and designer; Martin Posta, director of the Prague Signal Festival, and Valerie Bergeron, director of the Materials Centre of Barcelona (Martefad). During the prizegiving ceremony, Maria Güell, curator of the Llum BCN Festival, underlined the “high quality of the installations this year which are all very close to excellent”.  

This is the second year that the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture has won First Prize at the LlumBCN Awards.  In the 2017 edition, the “Clarobscur” project created by some of our architecture students was also ex aequo winner along with a project by ELISAVA.