It is a risky yet necessary bet to show the cultural value of digital language in architecture that, in general, is underestimated in academic environments. The exhibition “The Visible City / The City at Game” at CentroCentro in Madrid is an important attempt to decipher new and old languages of city building. For the nostalgic, it will remind them of their beginnings back in the 90s in Simcity or Pharaoh where, in a more daring way, they tried to build and manage settlements and cities in ancient Egypt. 

For architects who visit the exhibition, there are intelligent clues that connect them with their profession, such as the one revealed by Aida Red in the show’s central video, Ciudades y videojuegos: hacia un urbanismo interactivo, credited to Santiago Bustamante: “the video games known as arcade games drew their cities with an Egyptian perspective.” Such a connection of recent game engines and the history of architecture is perhaps the key to understanding the whole. At the same time, there is a lack of a narrative accompaniment that would contemporize more current pieces in the show, such as the work at the beginning of the show, Espacios resonantes by Sofía Balbontín, Mathias Klenner and Joan Lavandeira that combines industrial architecture and virtual tours.

The exhibition’s venue—CentroCentro—does not allow a complete immersion in the exhibition. Rather, the openness of the historical building assures a constant presence of the goings-on inside the building. These transit spaces could have been used in a didactic accompaniment of the social interest of the exhibited pieces. But perhaps too few tools are given to understand it as a laboratory for the construction of citizenship with the capacity to establish a participatory dialogue between agents. It remains halfway between satisfying one or the other in its general narrative.

jpi.