Parlour Gardens: Dreams from the rooftop at the Botanical Garden of Barcelona

The spring of 1926 marked the beginning of an unlikely collaboration at the intersection of three disciplines. Architect and landscape designer Nicolau M. Rubió i Tudurí, ceramicist Josep Llorens i Artigas, and French painter Raoul Dufy joined forces to create a series of jardinets de saló—parlour gardens—miniature ceramic worlds that encapsulated the spirit of the natural landscape in vessels small enough to rest on a table.

Inspired by the ancient tradition of miniature gardens and shaped by the Japonist sensibility that captivated European art at the turn of the twentieth century, these works proposed something radically new: the garden not as a place to inhabit, but as an image to contemplate.
Each piece was made of glazed ceramic at approximately 45 × 45 × 25 cm—a format that merged the architectural model, the decorative object, and the living planter into a single form. The first parlour gardens were presented at the Bernheim-Jeune galleries in Paris in 1927, where they received immediate international recognition. The following year, the works travelled to London and Belgium; by 1929 they had reached New York.

Nearly a century later, Parlour Gardens returns to Barcelona, reactivating this extraordinary and largely forgotten experiment through the work of fourteen internationally renowned landscape architects and architects from Mediterranean and Mediterranean-like climates around the world. The exhibition is on view until October 4 2026, at the Botanical Garden in Barcelona and will conclude with the 3rd Finissage event.

Participants include James Corner (Field Operations), Walter Hood (Hood Design Studio), Catherine Mosbach (Mosbach Paysagistes), Teresa Moller, Kamel Louafi, Tarna Klitzner, Adam Greenspan (PWP Landscape Architecture), Peter Stutchbury, Phil Harris (Troppo Architects), Thomas Doxiadis (Doxiadis+), Jala Makhzoumi and Abdul-Halim Jabr, Adrian McGregor (McGregor Coxall), and Gareth Doherty.

As part of Barcelona, UNESCO-UIA World Capital of Architecture 2026, commissioner Marina Cervera proposes to reimagine and update this singular format within a contemporary context.

The thirteen invited teams were selected together with co-commissioners José Luis Cortés, Past President of the UIA, and James Hayter, Past President of IFLA in an attempt to open conversation among disciplines.

The exhibition establishes a dialogue between one original parlour garden from 1926 and a new generation of living ceramic landscapes. Each piece reflects on contemporary questions of ecological resilience, climate adaptation, biodiversity and the cultural meanings embedded in gardens, suggesting that even the smallest garden can become a site for imagining alternative futures.

The participating designers also reconsider the rooftop garden as a critical site for contemporary cities: a place where architecture, landscape and ecology converge, and where small-scale interventions can become laboratories for more resilient urban futures.

Produced through a combination of advanced ceramic 3D printing and traditional craftsmanship by Martí Baltà CEO of Barcelona 3D Ceramics, the works are planted with living species and installed throughout the Botanical Garden of Barcelona according to their corresponding homoclimatic regions, —California, Chile, South Africa, Australia and the Mediterranean—so that the location and flora of each work echo the climate zone of its designer’s country of practice.

Presented directly on their wooden transport crates, the pieces reveal not only their materiality but also their condition as travelling landscapes. Following Barcelona, the exhibition will travel to Paris and Berlin in 2027 and subsequently continue through botanical gardens across Mediterranean and Mediterranean-like climates, creating new dialogues between place, ecology and imagination.

At a moment when cities are searching for new forms of environmental resilience, Parlour Gardens returns to Rubió i Tudurí’s original proposition: that a garden, however small, can hold an entire world.

Exhibition Location

Parlour Gardens,
Botanical Garden of Barcelona,
Barcelona, Spain
On view until 4 October 2026.