ELBULLILAB, A POP-UP LAB OPEN FOR 39 MONTHS

During the period of just over three years (April 2014 – June 2017), elBulliLab functioned as a research centre, located in a 1,500m² workspace on Carrer de Méxic 17, in Barcelona.

At elBulliLab, which could be conceived of as a pop-up lab, we dedicated ourselves to building the best possible ecosystem to promote efficiency and develop a durable creative system that incorporates immediacy, flexibility, a focused concentration, multitasking and related skills – fundamental themes for the restaurant world – into our research and analysis.

Within this ecosystem, we found that knowledge is key to the creative system. We used fine dining as a language, constantly contextualising it in relation to other professions, industrial sectors and academic disciplines.

We classified gastronomy with a view to learning what information was needed to understand it, then took this as a starting point for gathering knowledge. This work resulted in the Sapiens methodology, itself a product of elBulliLab.

Content was also created at elBulliLab and published in different formats: books, apps, exhibitions, etc. Subsequently, the results of this research has been reproduced as curated content, designed to contextualise and understand any given project. This curated content is gradually being edited and published in the creation of Bullipedia.

In 2018 the workspace was converted into LABulligrafía, elBulli’s museum archive, which is both physical (off-line) and digital (on-line). The Sapiens team also occupied part of the workspace in order to carry out the development of the Bullipedia project. Since 2020, the Sapiens team has been working in both LABulligrafía and elBulli1846.