The Historic Beauty Behind Mies Van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion
When in a museum or during an exhibition, the audience interacts in different ways with the art pieces. They are usually immersed in the beauty of the art pieces, or enchanted by the extraordinariness of the creative process behind those artworks– the historical circumstances behind them, what the artist really conceived and how. And it is not their fault, people are easily captured by beauty.
Barcelona Pavilion is an iconic work made by Mies Van Der Rohe and Lilly Reich, which has brought to light an unprecedented, architectural literature of space and use of materials. This architectural piece is out of time, and we could even say it belongs to contemporary architecture. This feeling of eternity is what captures visitors and expertise.
Photo via Fundació Mies Van Der Rohe Barcelona
It was built in 1929 for the International Exposition in Barcelona, settled in Montjuïc, its style was certainly ahead of time. Why was it necessary such an installation in 1929? What happened before the construction of such a magnificent creation? This is a story about political arrangements, architectural planning, and artistic freedom.
Let’s go back to September 1928, one year before the opening of the exhibition. At the end of a complex diplomatic issue between the two countries, Germany accepted the invitation of Spain to participate in the International Exhibition. This was the first international appointment Germany had received since the end of the First World War. For sure, after several years of economic crisis, they could not miss the opportunity to relaunch and show to the world the potential strength of its industry. Especially since Germany saw Spain as a strategic export bridge to Latin America.
The exhibition’s executive committee gave to Germany 16000 square meters free of charge, in order to create their artistic spaces and to build a symbolic structure representative of the growing German industry. The aim of Pavilion was functional: it was designated to be the inaugural meeting point of the exhibition, the conjunction place between the political representations of the two countries.
Photo via Fundació Mies Van Der Rohe Barcelona
On June 1st 1928, the Spanish embassy in Berlin announced that Germany had already selected the architect in charge of projecting and designing the entire German section, that is, the architectural development of the area that German industries would have occupied in the various buildings: Mies Van Der Rohe.
Mies Van Der Rohe went to Barcelona twice to choose and analyse the spaces that he would have to use within each building assigned, and to find the best and most visible locations for the different industries. During the inspection, he noticed that, regardless of his project, the experience of the German industrial exhibition would be inexorably fragmentary due to the Montjüic exhibition grounds. Furthermore, the fact that German industries would occupy only part of the area of these structures (since they would be mixed with sections of other nations), this would have increased the likelihood of a disjointed and non-linear appreciation.
Later on, Mies Van Der Rohe had to find the best architectural expression for distinguishing the identity of the German factor– both in the area of structures reserved for national industries, and in the singular and pure national Pavilion he was projecting. Palaces and pavilions had to adapt the same style to reveal the same identity. Therefore, Van Der Rohe did not conceive the Pavilion only as a representative space for the opening ceremony: it had to be the starting point of a sequence that would reach the inside of the 8 neoclassical buildings where the German industries would be on display.
The project was so complex and interrelated with so many expectations. Although he could do whatever he wanted, since he had all the artistic power and freedom, this was the most difficult project he faced.
Photo via Fundació Mies Van Der Rohe Barcelona
The piece consisted of a series of separate floors and two ponds raised on a travertine podium. In the central space of the interior there is a wall plan of Moroccan onyx in a honey-yellow color. It was made up of an extraordinary optical mechanism. Between reflections and transparencies, the brilliant chromed metal of the door and window frames and the cross-shaped columns, the black carpet, the red curtains and the golden and grey tones of the marble.
In the columns of the pavilion, he folds the chromed steel into a continuous sequence of concave and convex sides, which multiplies the accumulation of vertical lines, while amplifying the scope of their perception. This creates an emphasis on their supporting function to their total disappearance in space.
He had just over 6 months to conceive, develop and build the small pavilion: an exceptionally short time for a slow architect like him. The originality of Mies Van Der Rohe in the use of materials lay not so much in the novelty as in the ideal of modernity– it was expressed through the rigour of the geometry, the precision of the pieces and the clarity of its assembly. The spaces flow into each other.
In 1930, after the end of the Barcelona International Exhibition, the pavilion began to be dismantled. There were some attempts to sell the pavilion locally; an attempt was even made to turn it into a restaurant. At the end, German authorities decided to return the marble and stainless steel elements to Berlin, to reuse them in production processes of the German industry. Parts of the caramel-colored onyx wall were reused in the tables of Mies' apartment in Chicago.
Photo via Fundació Mies Van Der Rohe Barcelona
Until 1960, the pavilion was considered one of the most influential buildings of modern architecture, yet it has hardly been seen by anyone. There was no additional information available other than the publication of the photos in 1929; when the crowd of visitors went to the Barcelona exhibition, they only had the possibility to walk around the pavilion. Despite its prominent position in the layout of the Barcelona International Exhibition, journalists sent by professional architecture magazines also passed by, unable to grasp its mysterious meaning.
The existence of the pavilion was reduced to a paper state: to archival materials and published documents that testified to its creation and its existence, or that discussed its significance in twentieth-century architecture.
In 1981 Oriol Bohigas, head of the urban planning department of the Barcelona City Council, began the project to rebuild the pavilion with architects Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos. More than fifty years later, between 1984 and 1986, the pavilion was rebuilt on the original site, this time as a permanent structure. It was built from scratch, to reinterpret its original physiognomy in terms of a permanent building. The final result was brilliant, vividly chromatic and strange. People used to admire black and white photographs of the pavilion. The reconstructed work seems truer than the surviving representation in the images.
Barcelona Pavilion by Mies Van Der Rohe
