MADRID DESIGN FESTIVAL: CONTEMPORARY MATERIALITY
With Material Bank, we took the Contemporary Materiality exhibition to Madrid Design Festival 2025: eight materials moodboards and workshops for designers.
Events3 min read
On 19 and 20 February 2025 we had the pleasure of taking part in the Madrid Design Festival with the exhibition ‘Contemporary Materiality’, a space created in collaboration with Material Bank in room 2.2 of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza in Madrid.
Our consultancy team selected cutting-edge, sustainable and functional materials and arranged them in themed moodboards to show how a conscious choice —paying attention to the components, textures and properties of each material— can transform a space. In this article we look at the context of the festival, the categories of the exhibition, the workshops that accompanied it and how the samples could be ordered.
Contemporary Materiality at Madrid Design Festival 2025
The Madrid Design Festival, organised by La Fábrica, held its eighth edition from 6 February to 15 March 2025. According to the organisers' review, it brought together 338 activities, 115 exhibitions and 286,000 participants. Our exhibition was part of Fiesta Design, the programme open to the public that the festival concentrated at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, on Paseo del General Martínez Campos, with exhibitions, installations, workshops and talks.
‘Contemporary Materiality’ is also the name of a Matter exhibition format that we had already taken to Feria Hábitat València, in September 2023, and to the Materials Matter Exhibition 2024 at the COAC. In Madrid we presented it for the first time together with Material Bank, a few days before we officially announced our alliance, on 24 February 2025.
Eight moodboards, from natural materials to automated fabrication
A reading of materials from their origin to their process.
The moodboards explored eight categories: Natural Materials, Plant Fibres, Natural Waste, Industrial Waste, Plastic Waste, Technology, Automated Fabrication and Incremental Innovation. Together they trace a route that can be read in three broad groups:
- Natural origin: Natural Materials and Plant Fibres, focused on raw materials that come directly from nature.
- Waste as raw material: Natural Waste, Industrial Waste and Plastic Waste, materials that incorporate by-products or waste from other processes to give them a new use.
- Technology and process: Technology, Automated Fabrication and Incremental Innovation, where the interest lies in how the material is made or in the progressive improvement of established solutions.
One of the exhibition panels summed up the idea behind the groups devoted to waste: “With elements that come from recycling, we avoid creating more waste by recovering what has already been produced, and give it a new life as a decorative or construction element.”
For specifiers, organising materials by origin and process, and not just by appearance, helps to compare alternatives with sound judgement: what each material contains, how it has been made and what texture and performance it brings to the project.
Workshops for architects and interior designers
The exhibition was complemented by three workshops a day, at 11:00, 12:30 and 16:30, designed for invited architects and interior designers. In them, participants were able to experiment with the materials, discover new applications and explore Material Bank's digital platform as a tool for the creative process.
The installation followed the same approach: stacked cardboard modules serving as display cases, hexagonal plinths as worktables, spotlighting on each moodboard and computers for consulting the platform during the visit.
From moodboard to office
Free samples to keep working in the studio.
Those who visited us could request the moodboards on display and receive them at their office free of charge, so they could continue working with the samples on their own projects.
This is the service Material Bank offers: a platform for searching, comparing and ordering samples from different manufacturers, free for architecture and design professionals, who must register and verify their profile. According to the platform, orders placed before 18:30 (Central European Time) arrive the following morning in a single box. Together with the advice of our consultancy team and Matter's material libraries, it forms the basis of the alliance between the two companies.
After the festival
Thank you to everyone who joined us for this experience!
The collaboration with Material Bank continued in March at the II Semana de la Construcción MATCOAM, with the exhibition ‘Innovative Materiality’, and in June at the Materials Matter Exhibition 2025 in Barcelona, which we co-organised.
If you would like to explore natural, recycled or technological materials with our consultancy team, book your visit to Matter to discover our Materioteca.
