All That Is Solid Melts Into the Air
With Olga Subirós, architect-scholar
VENUE: Casino Display, 1, rue de la Loge, L-1945 Luxembourg
In English
Air is life. Yet today the air in our cities has become an invisible emergency as a result of the climate crisis and growing urban inequalities. This lecture invites architects, urban planners, and inhabitants to imagine a radical change in the way we need to design our cities in order to make the right to breathe clean air [SK1] a core concern of urban life. Olga Subirós’s research project air/aria/aire presented at the17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021 explored the way digital tools and collective action can help redesign the atmosphere itself. Continuing this inquiry, the project Dust Pavilion (since 2025) examines the material legacy of modern architecture through the particles that settle on its surfaces, revealing how matter, climate, and history are entangled. Together, these projects call for a shift—from sustaining to regenerating, from control to care—positioning life at the centre.
Olga Subirós is an architect, curator, and doctoral researcher at RMIT Architecture in Melbourne, Australia. Her PhD Displaying Emergency: A Situated Curatorial/Spatial Architecture investigates architecture as a curatorial/spatial practice and its potential to contribute to cultural change in times of ecological and social emergency. Her research develops strategies that reorganise institutional protocols, engage publics, and offer tools for collective transformation. Her exhibitions and research are situated in chronic emergencies, identifying urban, ecological, and cultural conflicts through architecture, design, and art. Her projects include Matter Matters. Designing with the World (Design Museum–DHUB Barcelona, 2025) and air/aria/aire (Catalan Pavilion, 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021), for which she earned the FAD International Award. She teaches in Barcelona at Elisava (UVic-UCC) and La Salle (URL), extending her practice through publications and public programmes.
Free admission
Graphic design: Inès Hosni
Lectures
Worlding Airs
Worlding Airs
In collaboration with the University of Luxembourg’s Master programme in Architecture, Casino Display hosts « Worlding Airs », a design studio that explores air not just as space but as a living environment connecting bodies, history, and politics. Building on « Worlding Soils » organised during the 2024/2025 academic year, the studio investigates the way architecture engages with air as both a material and immaterial element, thus shaping the relationships between human and more-than-human communities during times of ecological crisis and change.
In this context, a series of public lectures will be held to extend the studio’s research to wider audiences.
Partners
University of Luxembourg