The exhibition “Matter. Know-how. Place” will be open to visitors until 11 October 2025 at the IE Creativity Center, located in the Casa de la Moneda in Segovia. The exhibition explores the active role and potential of traditional building crafts in both architectural education and contemporary practice.
It features the work of the 2024 and 2025 Building Arts Awards winners, the winning design proposals from the sixth edition of the Richard H. Driehaus Architecture Competition, and a selection of projects by the master craftspeople and apprentices who received Donald Gray Building Arts Scholarships in the most recent edition.
The exhibition also includes a section dedicated to the academic and research work of Wesam Al Asali, architect and professor at IE School of Architecture and Design. His work is a bridge between contemporary architecture and traditional building cultures.
One of the effects of globalization is the progressive homogenization of landscapes, towns, and cities. But in turn, as a reaction to this, there is also a growing will to preserve, enhance, and consolidate their distinctive character: the forms, colors, materials, flavors, or cultural manifestations of any kind that continue to make places unique and remarkable.
This interest in place is proving conducive to new approaches to architectural and urban design—new outlooks seeking to integrate it into a building culture locally rooted in matter (materials), know-how (workmanship), and the environment.
This way of working draws on the experience of past generations in creating streets, squares, buildings, and landscapes that are handsome and durable and, moreover, conceived to support social cohesion and a feeling of community—edifying construction, architecture, and urbanism. It is also based on a knowledge of building trades, indispensable to the recovery and maintenance of a sense of place.
This exhibition celebrates that link between architectural and urban design and building trades, highlighting the urgency of contributing collectively to their study, their transmission and preservation, and their continuation.
The exhibition has been organised by the Traditional Building Cultures Foundation and the IE School of Architecture and Design, with the support of Richard H. Driehaus and the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and in collaboration with INTBAU Spain and the Spanish Council of Architects.
