Sam Farnsworth Hadler 12.6.10 The Barcelona Pavilion – Barometer of Culture While designing the German contribution to the 1929 Exposicion Internacional in Barcelona Mies van der Rohe dictated that all activity within his studio be devoted to establishing the “hard and clear atmosphere of technology and consciousness in which artistic and spiritual values can unfold." 1 This combination of clear material fact and an ethereal philosophical quality has been the hallmark of the “Barcelona Pavilion” (fig.1) ever since. In the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 International Exhibition of Modern Architecture Philip Johnson positioned the Barcelona Pavilion as an icon of what he termed the “International Style,” and to this day it enjoys an unshakable position within the canon of modern architecture. 2 Standing only six months before being demolished, the Pavilion was immortalized by a series of stark documentary photographs and then reconstructed in 1984. 3 This unusual physical history has spurred an abundance of complex artistic re-interpretations that in turn complicates our understanding of this small structure. The Barcelona Pavilion’s physical and philosophical lives wind circuitous and overlapping routes through our cultural landscape of the past 80 years and by tracing them we also describe an arc of Modernism. The architectural elements of the Barcelona Pavilion are well known. Mies hand-selected a site surrounded by trees in order to create “an ideal zone for tranquility.” 4 The building would host the King and Queen of Spain at the opening ceremonies and then serve as a rest stop for 1 Fritz Neumeyer, “Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House: Spaces of the Century,” in Global Architecture: Mies van der Rohe German Pavilion, ed. Yukio Futagawa (Tokyo: ADA Edita, 1995), 2. 2 Terrance Riley, Mies in Berlin (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 237. 3 Ibid, 236 4 Thomas Pavel, “Result Best Completion,” in The Barcelona Pavilion, ed. Ursel Berger and Pavel (Berlin: Jovis, 2006), 19.
Transcript
Sam Farnsworth
Hadler 12.6.10
The Barcelona Pavilion – Barometer of Culture
While designing the German contribution to the 1929 Exposicion Internacional in
Barcelona Mies van der Rohe dictated that all activity within his studio be devoted to establishing
the “hard and clear atmosphere of technology and consciousness in which artistic and spiritual
values can unfold."1 This combination of clear material fact and an ethereal philosophical quality
has been the hallmark of the “Barcelona Pavilion” (fig.1) ever since. In the Museum of Modern
Art’s 1932 International Exhibition of Modern Architecture Philip Johnson positioned the Barcelona
Pavilion as an icon of what he termed the “International Style,” and to this day it enjoys an
unshakable position within the canon of modern architecture.2 Standing only six months before
being demolished, the Pavilion was immortalized by a series of stark documentary photographs
and then reconstructed in 1984.3 This unusual physical history has spurred an abundance of
complex artistic re-interpretations that in turn complicates our understanding of this small
structure. The Barcelona Pavilion’s physical and philosophical lives wind circuitous and
overlapping routes through our cultural landscape of the past 80 years and by tracing them we
also describe an arc of Modernism.
The architectural elements of the Barcelona Pavilion are well known. Mies hand-selected a
site surrounded by trees in order to create “an ideal zone for tranquility.”4 The building would
host the King and Queen of Spain at the opening ceremonies and then serve as a rest stop for
1 Fritz Neumeyer, “Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House: Spaces of the Century,” in Global Architecture: Mies van der Rohe German Pavilion, ed. Yukio Futagawa (Tokyo: ADA Edita, 1995), 2. 2 Terrance Riley, Mies in Berlin (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 237. 3 Ibid, 236 4 Thomas Pavel, “Result Best Completion,” in The Barcelona Pavilion, ed. Ursel Berger and Pavel (Berlin: Jovis, 2006), 19.
2
visitors weary from wandering the Exposition.5 The layout is free flowing, the walls are mostly
glass, and there is little to demarcate interior spaces from the sprawling courtyard. Finished in four
varieties of stone (two green marbles, travertine, and onyx dore), tinted glass (green, gray, white,
and clear), and chromed metal, the building fused both new and traditional materials in a small
but seamless space. Likewise, both classical and modern design techniques were utilized.
Columns, pedestals, pools, and a large sculpture of a nude figure by George Kolbe were combined
with the, “dionysian freedom of a dynamic modern spatial arrangement.”6 Visitors were not meant
to be led in a straight line through the building but to take continuous turnabouts along the way.
Since the Pavilion had no specific function other than to provide a resting space, Mies was freed
from the usual confines associated with making a space livable for the long term. Only a few
pieces of furniture were meticulously placed. In collaboration with Lilly Reich, Mies found
influence for a crossed-legged side table and chairs from Roman folding chairs used by civic
leaders as portable thrones. The “Barcelona chair” is as iconic, if not as mysterious, as the Pavilion
in which it was originally situated and is today mass-produced and sold as a modern accessory.
Due to the deepening economic crisis enveloping Europe, the close of the Exposition saw
the Pavilion dismantled and sold back to the various vendors who supplied its materials.7 First,
though, it was documented in a series of thirteen black and white photographs in the Berliner Bild-
Bericht (Berlin Picture Bulletin) (figs.2&3). An effort was made at objective representation,
avoiding atmospheric impressions, detail studies, or the inclusion of any people.8 Each
photograph shows a broad angle of the Pavilion, including both floor and ceiling.9 These images
were soon published throughout Europe and U.S., and were the only images Mies would ever
5 Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe, A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 162. 6 Kenneth E. Silver, Chaos and Classicism; Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2010), 35. 7 Schulze, Mies van der Rohe, A Critical Biography, 160. 8 Thomas Pavel, “The Barcelona Pavilion as Media Event,” in The Barcelona Pavilion, ed. Ursel Berger and Pavel (Berlin: Jovis, 2006), 52. 9 Ibid, 52.
3
approve for printing.10 Although after the Exposition there were offers to use the structure of the
Barcelona Pavilion as a restaurant or other functional space, Mies made no effort to facilitate the
preservation of the building.11 Instead, as George Dodds has surmised, Mies believed that the
photographs would preserve the timeless perfection of the Pavilion’s pristine surfaces and provide
a more lasting representation of his intentions than would a compromised version of the actual
building.12 Whereas Walter Benjamin supposed that the mechanical reproduction of a work of art
would destroy its magical, artistic aura,13 here the inverse seems to be true. The understated nature
of the Bild-Bericht photographs coupled with the absence of the actual structure has played a
central part in the elevation of the Pavilion to an icon of modern architecture.14 Mies seems to
have had an early understanding of the advertising adage that to increase demand one must limit
supply.
The American architect Philip Johnson was one of the few Americans to visit the Barcelona
Pavilion during the 1929 exposition.15 The next year he launched the Museum of Modern Art’s
Department of Architecture and Design, and in 1932 organized the aforementioned International
Style exhibit. The Bild-Bericht photographs were included therein and again to greater effect after
the war in a 1946 Mies van der Rohe retrospective at MOMA, also organized by Johnson.16 This
retrospective used large versions of the photographs, mounted on wall partitions almost as trompe
l’oeil recreations of the Pavilion. After fleeing Nazi Germany,17 Mies settled in Chicago in 1938
10 George Dodds, “Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion,” RES no. 39 (Spring 2001): 171. 11 Ibid, 182. 12 Ibid, 182. 13 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 25. 14 Dodds, “Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion,” 170. 15 Ibid, 171 16 Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 58. 17 Hitler was disgusted with the photos he saw of the Barcelona Pavilion. He saw it as a, “…[B]astard temple to technology, with its handcrafted chromes and luxuriously handpolished marbles, [it] was nothing more than a whorish mockery of the misguided worship of mass production.” A person at the viewing remarked that, “Mies van der Rohe is dead as an architect in Germany.” Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune; Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 203.
4
and this exhibit is widely credited for introducing him to a broad swath of the American public.18
He became a naturalized citizen in 1944 and would be busy with teaching and architectural
commissions until his death in 1969.19 Several of his late projects, notably the Farnsworth House
(1951) (fig.9) drew direct inspiration from the Barcelona Pavilion. The Pavilion’s innovative open
layout, its sleek surfaces utilizing new materials, and its simple, unadorned lines would prove to
be among the building blocks for the burgeoning design industry of the 1950s and 60s.20 MOMA
again championed Mies in their 1950 exhibit What is Modern Design,21 and Jeffrey Meikle among
others has noted Mies’s influence on a range of mid-century products, from Knoll furniture to
corporate office towers.22 A proliferation of the latter rose in imitation of Mies’s seminal Seagram
Building, completed in 1958.23 Mies collaborated with Philip Johnson on this project, and in some
ways --- the set back from the street, a plaza flanked by reflecting pools and fountains, its rich
materials providing an understated opulence24--- it revisits on an American scale some of the
breakthroughs Mies made with the Barcelona Pavilion. In fact, so pervasive were his designs in the
commercial sector that even Disneyland got in on the act. Their House of the Future (1957-67)
(fig.8), its curvilinear façade notwithstanding, clearly refers back to the clean lines, glass walls,
innovative materials, and raised structures of the Farnsworth House and Barcelona Pavilion.
According to Jeffrey Meikle, somewhere in the late 60s, popular design became
predictable and high design entered a stagnant phase. He writes, “Except for Saarinen’s air
terminals, the swanky Miami beach hotels of Morris Lapidus and the neon sculptures of the Las
Vegas strip, corporate and government architecture echoed the repetitive lines of Mies’s austere
18 Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 217 19 Ibid, 220 20 Jeffrey Meikle, Design in the USA (New York: Oxford University Press 2005,) 139. 21 Ibid, 148. 22 Ibid, 139, 176. 23 Ibid, 176. 24 Ibid, 176.
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internationalism.”25 Arguably it was the dawn of postmodernism, because during this time a switch
seems to have been made by artists and architects. Where previously the sincere imitation of an
icon like the Barcelona Pavilion proved its cultural relevance, the next wave of imitations would
prove paradoxical, often flavored with a strong dose of irony.
1979 marked the Barcelona Pavilion’s 50th anniversary and the National Gallery in
Washington D.C. celebrated the occasion with an exhibit devoted to the Bild-Bericht photographs.
Several years later Mies’s centenary was celebrated with symposia, exhibitions, and the
publication of more than 300 articles and books, doubling the literature of the previous sixty years
combined.26 This created a renewed interest in the architect and would eventually lead to the
rebuilding of the Pavilion in 1984 (fig.4).27 The reconstruction was the result of a long and difficult
process that galvanized the architectural community.28 Both this second version of the Pavilion
and the Bild-Bericht photographs that had previously represented the Pavilion were now ripe for
postmodern questions of authenticity, authority, chronology, and reproducibility. Susan Sontag’s
1977 On Photography and Roland Barthes 1980 Camera Lucida were instrumental texts in helping
artists (especially photographers) formulate these new questions. Sontag used the term "incitements
to reverie"29 for photographs that “destabilize the “normative limits of an architectural
experience,”30 and indeed the Bild-Bericht photos fit that bill. Seemingly by themselves they
conveyed for 50 years the meditative calm supposed to befall a visitor in the Pavilion, and
canonized a modern building no longer in existence. How could anyone familiar with these
images be able to experience the Pavilion’s second incarnation without them in mind?
25 Ibid, 170. 26 Dodds, “Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion,” 173. 27 Dodds, “Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion,” 173. 28 Frances Anderton, “Peripheral importance in Barcelona: Reconstruction of Mies' Pavilion Built for the Barcelona Exhibition of 1929,” The Architectural Review v. 185 (January 1989): 5. 29 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 21. 30 Ibid, 21.
6
Dan Graham was one of the first artists to refer to the Barcelona Pavilion in conceptual,
perhaps postmodern ways. With his mirrored pavilions, the first of which appeared in 1978,
Graham has explored issues of transparency and the phenomenological and optical effect of a
transportable, re-siteable object (fig.5).31 He cites the tautological aspects of the Barcelona
Pavilion’s history as an influence, and finds inspiration in its self-contained status: building-as-
sculpture-as object.32 Responding to the 1984 reiteration of the Barcelona Pavilion, Rem Koolhaas
famously remarked, “Its aura is destroyed,”33 and wondered how this “clone of Mies’s Pavilion…
differ[s] from Disney.”34 Koolhaas’s thinly veiled reference to, and ironic reversal of, Benjamin’s
arguments in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, would lead to his own
interpretive recreation of the Pavilion at the 1985 Milan Triennale (figs.6,7). In collaboration with
his firm, Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Koolhaas reproduced the plan of the original
Pavilion but warped to fit a curved area inside Milan’s Palazzo della Triennale.35 An array of
sounds, odors, laser lights, mirrors and projected images harassed viewers in an attempt to convey
a chaotic and semi-fictionalized history of the Pavilion.36 George Dodds supposes that this
recreation “demonstrates that the photographic history of the Barcelona Pavilion is not static. The
Bild-Bericht photographs and the stories that have grown up around them oscillate between
31 unidentified author, [biography online] (accessed 2 December 2010); available from http://listart.mit.edu/files/files/MIT-pw-dan%20graham-color.pdf 32 Ibid 33 Pavel, “The Barcelona Pavilion as Media Event,” 52. 34 Derek Sayer, “The Unbearable Lightness of a Building: a Cautionary Tale.” Grey Room, 16, 2004, 8. 35 Dodds, “Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion,” 187. 36 OMA’s website transcribes portions of the text voiced over a loudspeaker by an omnipresent narrator: “The grand exposition closed. / The crowds were gone. / The King and Queen had signed the book. / The pools were empty. / Back home, Germany was in confusion. / The pavilion was too heavy to move easily, unlike the other temporary pavilions, which looked much more like buildings. / It was decided to leave the pavilion as a gift to the Spanish, until a decision could be made on what to do with it, and so it stood, a gothic outpost in the land of the Moors. The political situation became tense in Spain and issues other than architecture became more important. Bombs went off in the vicinity. In the turmoil, the presence of the pavilion that had always been so natural was overlooked completely…. / The pavilion was abandoned once again. / In later fighting it was seriously damaged. For the first time, the world could see the pathetic sight of modern architecture, in ruins but no one had time to notice. / The new regime was serious about resolving the issue of the pavilion once and for all. They had good relations with the new government in the pavilions homeland. They did not like the former Republican’s headquarters and decided to send it back to its home by train, as a friendly gesture…
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documentation and depiction.”37 Where previously these photographs were accepted as accurate
and concise representations, the reconstruction of the Pavilion now encouraged artists and critics
to wonder what, exactly, these reproductions depicted.
The 80s and 90s ushered in a revision of modernism that saw a renewed interest in
simulation, the questioning of originality, and the criticism of an artwork’s media context.38 For
artists working in this vein, the Barcelona Pavilion provided a rich source of fodder. The artist team
of Fischli and Weiss visited the rebuilt Pavilion during their tour around the world. The banal and
the sublime intermingle in the “snapshots" that resulted from this and other cultural stops.39 If a
photograph of the new Pavilion exactly reproduces the angle and lighting of a Bild-Bericht print
can it also inspire a profound cultural effect like that of those first photographs? In 1998 Hiroshi
Sugimoto made a series of painstaking but out of focus images of the pavilion (fig.10). Among
these are several that replicate the composition of the Bild-Bericht photographs, but he primarily
wanted to make the image that led to them --- Mies’s first creative vision of the Pavilion. Sugimoto
said, “[I want] to recreate the imaginative visions of architecture before the architect built the
building.”40 In an article discussing these re-interpretations, Thomas Pavel writes that Sugimoto
“makes a paradoxical attempt to win something of the aura back for the subject that has already
been frozen into a cliché by a process of repeated reproduction.”41 Conveying the multi-
generational and complex history of photographic reproductions of the Pavilion, Pavel
acknowledges that while the Bild-Bericht photographs do not correspond to Benjamin’s theories
about the effects of mechanically reproduced images,42 here he suggests that the next slew of
reproductions do. Yet according to Pavel, Sugimoto’s work, the most recent in this line of imagery,
37 Ibid, 188 38 Pavel, “The Barcelona Pavilion as Media Event,” 65. 39 Ibid, 65. 40 Ibid, 70. 41 Ibid, 70. 42 Ibid, 52
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manages not just to preserve the Pavilion’s “aura,” but also to reverse some of the damage done to
it by previous photographs.
The German painter Gunther Forg builds on this rhetoric with an extensive series of blurry
and purposefully bad photos of the Barcelona Pavilion (fig.11). Enlarged greatly and presented in a
wood frame, Forg calls them paintings.43 By playing a game of disillusionment and appropriation
with one of the iconic achievements of modernity, artists like Sugimoto and Forg helped to
advance the artistic dialogue of the late twentieth century.44 Less clear is the result these games
have had on the Barcelona Pavilion itself. The many creative manipulations, including its own
reconstruction, both expand its cultural relevance, and obscure any sense of a true definition or
concise meaning.
Working in this interchange between artists and architecture, Rosalind Krauss’s essay “The
Grid, The /Cloud/, and The Detail” from a 1996 compilation of interdisciplinary essays called The
Presence of Mies, invokes the image of a /cloud/ to describe aspects of art that are unknowable or
undefined.45 She discusses Filippo Brunelleschi and Agnes Martin as two artists who sought a
classical type of order but could only clarify so much. She writes, “And if the /architectural/ came
to symbolize the reach of the artist’s ‘knowledge,’ the /cloud/ operated as the lack in the center of
that knowledge, the outside that joins the inside in order to constitute it as an inside.”46 She stops
short of reading the Barcelona Pavilion in terms of the /cloud/ but expressly suggests that it should
be.47 And indeed this reading corresponds with the Pavilion’s dual lives. Its classical, orderly
layout cannot answer the questions posed by a series of artistic reinterpretations – a list that
includes the Pavilion’s physical reincarnation as well as the Bild-Bericht photographs. Or can it? Is
43 Ibid 66. 44 Ibid, 66. 45 Rosalind Krauss, “The Grid, The /Cloud/, and The Detail,” in The Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Mertins (Princeton: Architectural Press), 1996, 133-146. 46 Ibid, 142. 47 Ibid, 146.
9
it possible that this cloud of unknowing48 is somehow an echo of the ethereal “artistic and spiritual
values”49 that Mies hoped to create with his harmonious proportions and attention to detail?
Jeff Wall sought to subvert the Pavilion’s mystical, nebulous reputation with his large-scale
photograph, Morning Cleaning, from 1999 (fig.12). He chose a canonical diagonal view to
establish his respect for the Pavilion’s visual history,50 but his image shows the Pavilion during its
daily service by a janitor. According to Thomas Pavel, by insisting on a type of order achieved in
the act of cleaning, Wall undermines and counteracts the perfectionist architecture.51 Pavel writes,
"The Pavilion appears as a building whose clarity and cleanliness is the result of the daily work of
specific people … The location of pure art enjoyment, the central location of modern architecture
is turned into a profane everyday workplace.”52 Christine Conley has read Morning Cleaning more
in relationship to Duchamp’s Large Glass, and suggested that Wall’s image is an “allegory of the
frustrated dreams of the modernist avant-garde to engage meaningfully with those of the
proletariat, a failure at the heart of Wall’s critique of conceptual art.”53 This reading marks another
juncture in the Pavilion’s circuitous path through our culture. In the beginnings of a new century
postmodernism’s obscure and convoluted purposes have given way to more direct and accessible
types of artistic activity.
Morning Cleaning introduces some of the current, and quotidian, uses of the Barcelona
Pavilion. Today, the Pavilion is available as a rental space for corporate parties and trade shows.54
In addition, the artists who are now chosen to create site-specific works or interventions within the
48 The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism from the fourteenth century. The book advises seeking God not through knowledge or the intellect, but instead through a practice of contemplative unknowing. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works. Translated by A. C. Spearing. New York: Penguin Classics. 2001. 49 Neumeyer, “Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House: Spaces of the Century,” 2. 50 Pavel, “The Barcelona Pavilion as Media Event,” 69. 51 Ibid, 69. 52 Ibid, 70. 53 Christine Conley, “Morning Cleaning: Jeff Wall and “The Large Glass,” Art History v. 32 no. 5 (December 2009), 1002. 54 Edward Lifson, [blog online] (accessed 2 December 2010) available from http://edwardlifson.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-you-could-rent-barcelona-Pavilion.html
10
Pavilion are selected for their broad appeal.55 The Mies van der Rohe Foundation is making a
concerted attempt to diversify the types visitors the Pavilion receives. In a recent article entitled
“Sacrilege is Positive,” Hilde Teerlink, then the artistic director of the Pavilion, justifies the
“sacrilege” of going against Mies’s intentions and using the space in ordinary ways. “The
Pavilion,” she writes, “is visited by a very specific group of people – mainly foreign architects or
students, who view the building as some sacred temple... In contrast, you only have to ask a taxi
driver to realize that many of the locals have never even heard of it. Given this situation, the Mies
van der Rohe Foundation… decided some years ago to start up a small program of contributions
by contemporary artists in order to broaden its appeal to visitors.”56 This program was inspired by
the history of artists using “the building as a model or as an explicit source of inspiration for their
work.”57 Jeff Wall was one of the first visiting artists, or “guests,”58 although Morning Cleaning was
not his official contribution. More recently these guest artists have installed artworks based on the
Pavilion itself so that the visitor might reinterpret Mies’s architecture (fig.14).59 In order to expand
and diversify Mies’s audience, the foundation includes within their pavilion “model”60 types of art
descended from the cultural repurposing of Graham, Koolhaas, Sugimoto, Forg, and Wall, among
others. Is postmodern appropriation now a tourist attraction?
This year in New York, the Guggenheim Museum opened Chaos & Classicism, a large
exhibition that examines the art of France, Italy, and Germany between 1918-1936. Summarized,
the exhibition posits that the stark classicism of the period between the wars helped pave the way
for fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. Several components of the Pavilion are on display including a
reproduction of Kolbe’s elegant figure, the Barcelona chair and table, examples of the marble used
for on the walls, and a slender chrome plated steel column (fig.13). They serve as illustrations of
the new materials that were then in use and of the types of classicism then in vogue. Neither
postmodern nor quotidian, the Pavilion in this context is an historical relic, a rare occasion when it
can be reduced to a relatively simple formula. The catalogue elaborates on its history slightly more
fully, but because of the breadth of the exhibit’s subject, no space is made to discuss the vast array
of artistic appropriations or re-interpretations made over the years.61
George Dodds wrote that the Barcelona Pavilion is, “a virtual ur-hut of modernity, [yet] the
one building by Mies about which the least can be said with certainty.”62 Perhaps the uncertainty
that swirls around the pavilion has less to do with it, itself, and more to do with twentieth century
art in general. A review of the Pavilion’s history suggests that in many ways this small structure is
not just an icon of modernist architecture, it’s also an emblem of the modernism itself. By tracing a
brief version of its complex chronology we can see that the Pavilion parallels the basic contours of
the modernist arc: early twentieth century beginnings, WW II hibernation, re-emergence in mid-
century commercial design, enmeshed in the conceptual chaos of postmodernism, then resting as
an historical relic. Its double life of subdued classical physical form and a metaphysical sense of
the unknowable are among the central tenants of modernism and postmodernism respectively.
What has emerged today is of course more difficult to ascertain, but if we continue look at
the Pavilion as a kind of barometer of culture, we might learn something from its subdued and
simplified appearance in a major historical --- not contemporary --- exhibition. Maybe this
showing suggests the fact that Pavilion, and by extension twentieth century art, has lost some of its
contemporaneity, and can instead be viewed through a purely historical lens. Yet while it is now
possible to study the Pavilion’s modernism from a remove, the Mies van der Rohe foundation’s
efforts to diversify its avant-garde audience sets the Pavilion in lock-step with new forms of
contemporary art. More than just a tourist attraction, the Pavilion in this role parallels today’s ideas
61 Silver, Chaos and Classicism; Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936, 35-7. 62 Dodds, “Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion,” 173.
12
of the “end of the elite,”63 and of Miwon Kwon’s term, the “collective artistic praxis.”64 Here a truly
social form of art is promoted by praising actions --- especially those involving collaboration ---
above lonely philosophical theories. It values experimentation and communication and the
bringing together of people, over lofty and obtuse artistic intentions. And if Mies would consider
such endeavors sacrilege, then perhaps sacrilege of this type is indeed a good thing.
Figure 1: Recent view of the Barcelona Pavilion’s reconstruction.
63 The end of the elite, and the end of quality was among the issues discussed at the seminar, “Aesthetics of Amateurism/Deskilling,” with poet Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation with David Grubbs at the CUNY Graduate Center, November 19, 2010. 64 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 154. “…(the) collective artistic praxis, I would suggest, is a projective enterprise. It involves a provisional group, produced as a function of specific circumstances instigated by an artist and/or a cultural institution, aware of the effects of these circumstances on the very conditions of the interaction, performing its own coming together and coming apart as a necessary incomplete modeling or working-out of a collective social process. Here a coherent representation of the group’s identity is always out of grasp. And the very status of the “other” inevitably remains unsettled, since contingencies of the negotiations inherent in collaborative art projects-between individuals within the group, between the group and various “outside” forces – would entail the continuous circulation of such a position. Such a praxis also involves a questioning of the exclusions that fortify yet threaten the groups own identity.”
13
Figure 2: View of the Pavilion’s courtyard. One of the thirteen original images from the 1929 Berliner Bild-Bericht.
Figure 3: Interior view of the Pavilion. One of the thirteen original images from the 1929 Berliner Bild-Bericht
14
Figure 4: View of the Barcelona Pavilion reconstruction with Kolbe’s figure.
Figure 5: Dan Graham, Pavilion, 2001.
15
Figure 6: Rem Koohaas and OMA, Casa Palestra, “The Domestic Project,” Pavilion for the 1986 Milan Triennale.
Figure 7: Rem Koohaas and OMA, Casa Palestra, “The Domestic Project,” Pavilion for the 1986 Milan Triennale.
16
Figure 8: Disneyland’s House of the Future, 1957-67.
Figure 9: Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, completed 1951 in Plano, Illinois.
17
Figure 10: One from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Barcelona Pavilion photographic series.
Figure 11: Two from Gunther Forg’s Barcelona Pavilion photographic series.
18
Figure 12: Jeff Wall, Morning Cleaning.
13. Authors photo from Chaos&Classicism’s Barcelona 14. Recent interactive installation in the Barcelona Pavilion
Pavilion display. by Art Club Berlin.
19
Bibliography
Books:
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2008.
Dodds, George. Building desire: on the Barcelona Pavilion. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Hochman, Elaine S. Architects of Fortune; Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich. New York:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.
Hochman, Elaine S. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. New York: Fromm International, 1997.
Johnson, Philip. Mies van der Rohe. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978.
Krauss, Rosalind. “The Grid, The /Cloud/, and The Detail,” in The Presence of Mies, ed., Detlef
![[architecture ebook] Mies van der Rohe - Farnsworth house.pdf](https://static.documents.pub/doc/80x56/5457960ab1af9f0b318b49ea/architecture-ebook-mies-van-der-rohe-farnsworth-housepdf.jpg)
