Ex-Designer Project Bar

Martí Guixé, with the collaboration of Pau Badia, conceived this digitally designed interior, produced exclusively using 3D printing. The project started in November 2015, and was redesigned and constructed as the work progressed. Three printers installed in situ printed the wall tiles, furniture, glasses and dishes, during talks, beers and concerts, over a period lasting more than four years.

The process is what matters, and so the project became somewhat performative, adopting happenstance in a natural way. The activity of the establishment was just as important as its role as a laboratory for experimentation on the possibilities of additive printing, in an attempt to see whether the utopia of digital autonomy was something real.

Just as the bar was finished and the inauguration scheduled, the pandemic and subsequent lockdown forced the place to close. Now, and this time behind closed doors, the bar has undergone an orderly “deconstruction” process, as if it were an archaeological project, in order to preserve it. The Ex-Designer Project Bar is no longer a bar or an interior, instead becoming an “object”, exempt from habitability, for other possible uses and places. The process continues.

Martí Guixé (Navàs, 1964), graduated in design from Escola Elisava in 1985, has worked between Barcelona and various cities around the world. In the 1990s, he began to investigate the relationship between design and gastronomy, an area he has dealt with in several projects. He calls himself Ex-Designer, a term that places him in a not at all limited territory. In his professional and creative practice, he questions the role of the designer and the need to continue designing objects, convinced that it is necessary to work in the field of ideas and concepts, not so much in materiality and prototyping.