I got curious. I ran across an early plan for Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and wondered what it might look like in three dimensions, thus this model. I entered the project with expectations of discovering a trace of some buried idea unknown to us all these years that, once unearthed, might lead to full structural understanding of the Pavilion as built, to larger insight into the mind of Mies, revelation into the mind of architecture, the mind of the world itself, all of which, of course, is absurd.
We do that too much, think we need to look beneath the surface and raise what most of us cannot see and fit it into some critical structure within which we should align ourselves, without which we cannot understand ourselves and move forward.
Really, the differences between the plan and the final construction are not great. Then again, I make this tentative conclusion, that our salvation depends on attention to small things, to what lies obvious before us, once seen clearly, felt within, once absorbed. Mies said similar. More tentatively, I suggest there are no great revelations and we need to find ways to manage that fact, which the Pavilion does marvelously.
The evidence for the process of planning and construction, about a year, up to its opening at the Barcelona exposition in 1929, is sketchy. Models, drawings, and notes were lost or discarded; Allied bombing destroyed official German records of the exhibition. Some of Mies’s own recollections decades later do not fit the available evidence, and the plan Werner Blaser used in his seminal monograph, 1965, created around that time in Mies’s Chicago studio, is inaccurate in several key aspects. A few original sketches have survived, however, along with three floor plans perhaps in sequence that bear the German workshop’s stamp. These give close attention to layout and proportions, of which the above is the first. Along with them, a final plan, created after 1929, widely circulated, its accuracy later questioned as well. And once the exhibition was over, the Pavilion was demolished and scrapped for parts. I take Plan I—Wolf Tegethoff’s designation—and almost all factual information from his careful and thorough study in Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses.
Plan I assumes approximately the same site as that of the final construction. Shown above, the 1986 recreation of the original. The Pavilion was located at the end of a major cross-axis of the exhibition and set before and within a hill covered with lush greenery. Within the greenery, hidden, steps that led up to the Spanish Village, a major attraction to which the pavilion allowed access, also hidden. From this view it is not clear how to enter, even if we are supposed to, but walk closer and the issue is quickly resolved. Ascend a few steps and we are standing on another plane.
The Barcelona Pavilion is both a distinctive yet modest structure, formal yet informal and inviting. It maintains a low-lying horizontal presence within the greenery, beneath an open sky, which, in its modesty, quietly assumes a great deal without settling on some statement large and certain, on a fixed proposition of the relationship of its construction to nature, to anything. It opens up and challenges our connection to what surrounds, soars above us. Mies takes us back and forth, within and without, posing, leaving questions unanswered, giving us a home for this exchange.
Plan I, larger and more oblong, looks to go further into the hill, closer to the steps behind. The layout of the right side, except for entry, is similar to that of the other plans and the final with its unconnected walls, the placement of glass, the uncovered pool, the overhanging plane of the roof. The major differences are in the left area, where space surrounds the pool, accounting for the plan’s greater length. The left wall stops well short, while in the final it continues to the front and makes a turn in whose corner the pool is located. Also the office area is more open, in keeping with the layout of the main area on the right. The podium is structurally apparent throughout with spacing all around, except at two walls of the office area. And Plan I indicates bases for three statures, not the single one we know, who stands in the pool on the right, Kolbe’s Dawn.
Overall dimensions of my model are close; parts within are slightly off for a variety of reasons that would be tedious to explain. I took thick lines to indicate solid walls and thin to mark glass, even though one covers the toilet in the office area. The two roofs are indicated by the thin lines of rectangles, though at C that space is left open. The alley at B is curious, as it ends at the office area without providing access. The view of that wall from within would have been unusual, maybe odd. Set further in, however, it highlights the podium, especially as we approach from the left, and adds a note of asymmetrical balance. The closed area at E suggests a garden area visible only from the office. Note the smaller space at D, before the existing stairs, which suggests Plan I is wider as well.
The three small rectangles at S would be bases for the three statues, perhaps reclining—mine are square. Also note the front edge of the pool does not quite align with that of the main roof but lines up with the front edge of the roof of the office as well as with the end of the wall behind.
Maybe more to consider here, maybe not. Whenever we look at a Mies design we always feel we have missed some key detail and yet have overdone our close inspection.
Proportions of the rectangles vary accordingly. I used the same materials for the walls as in the final construction, perhaps not a leap on my part. The orange onyx for the central interior wall had already been purchased by Mies at great expense and figures in all subsequent designs. Likely he had the other materials in mind.
While the front steps are hidden within a projection of the podium in the final when the building is viewed frontally, in Plan I one step rests visibly on a forecourt at A. Plan I has one less step, which suggests this court is raised above ground level. An early rough sketch Mies made, entirely different, also shows this elevation. I covered it with the same material, the travertine used throughout. This way the court would have anticipated what lay above, already visible to those who approach. I like this decision and can’t defend it at all. In the final construction, this area lies on the same level and matches the surface of the ground area around, giving the overall design a large indentation that breaks into the notion of a whole rectangle.
Not marked, benches and, most notably, the supporting columns, which appear in all later designs. Perhaps Mies had the posts in mind, perhaps their absence indicates the tentative nature of this plan. Or maybe he wanted to see a design without them. I’m not at all clear how much they are needed for support. The roof was not heavy. Walls, steel-framed and skinned with stone, and maybe the frames of the glass walls, provide support for the roof at several points and could have been reinforced. Freestanding, the columns suggest the modernist tenet of independence of structural support that allows open, flexible placement of walls. But, again, I’m not clear how much support they actually offer and visually they don’t appear structurally significant, in fact the opposite. Esthetically, however, cross-shaped steel covered with shining chrome, they give accent, another element in contrast to the stone and glass. They make a nod towards recent technology; very abstractly they suggest fluted columns of the past, which in ancient temples also once stood free.
Mies’s Brick Country House, also well known and well received, which existed only as concept drawings for exhibition some six years before, provides the closest precedent. As the Pavilion, it has an open plan without definite, symmetrical axes that allows active interchange of interior and exterior space without resolution. Also similar is the separation of function. The drawing above ambiguously labels the area of activity on the right as “service area,” which is separated from that on the left, labeled “living area.” The Pavilion maintains the same separation, with the functional office area on the left.
Both, as types, suggest houses in an abstract, contemplative way. In the Brick Country House, decidedly a home for the landed gentry, separation could denote privilege and hierarchy, the division of upper class residents from servants, at the rear. The Pavilion, with all the stone, its ample space, is downright luxurious. Then again, it is a public building, open to everyone, and whether Mies’s intent or not, there is a suggestion of the democratic in the Brick Country’s House’s openness and interconnection. The service area doesn’t have to be staffed with servants. At the very least those who live there will be aware there is a world beyond them, that they, that none of us live on an island.
Once released a schema can take on a life of its own. Both designs could be projected onto a social plane, where we are given flexibility and freedom, where all are included and given active voice, where our basic needs and larger purposes are separated yet kept related. On a personal level, both promote a model of the self in context, one that sets a priority, living, simply being in the world, alive itself. Taken as philosophical, even spiritual models both open up ways of thought, notions of existence.
Mies must have been working out basic ideas without getting down to all the details. There was something he wanted to see. Likely, objections to Plan I led to shifts in finalizing the design. I have no idea what he saw, however, and all I can say with confidence is that he didn’t use it. Some observations, though, can be made.
The obvious advantage to this plan is the space allowed to walk around the large pool and two of the statues. Also made apparent almost everywhere is the fact that the building rests on a podium. It is given weight and presence, literally and figuratively making a proposition about foundation and elevation, the need for a base, perhaps recalling the structure and intent of an ancient temple, which it resembles.
Beyond that, however, there is little definite sense of interrelationship or organizing tension. The walls, largely horizontal, are largely unconnected. Their presence is minimal compared to the mass of the base, made more so by the matching stone of most. We are more aware of openness than a structure enclosed on four sides, and what the layout most suggests is a place for wandering, where there is no set program or procession. It is the stability of the base that anchors this ambience.
There is no mystery or deception in hiding the stairs at the rear. Making them visible would have made a disruptive hole dividing the pavilion down the middle. I’m curious how Mies viewed them and how much they were used by visitors. The Pavilion needed some other entry/exit, however, to open it up at the rear, and perhaps, had there not been the steps, he would have built an entry anyway, leading to some garden spot he added.
The planes of the pools and roofs, however, close together, lying approximately on the same horizontal axis, suggest a definite plan. They reinforce the notion of enclosure within an axial and rectangular construction with only slight variation. Add the forecourt to overall perception and the notion of a rectangle is almost complete.
While those planes are scarcely visible to those approaching, they will be dramatically present once experienced inside, especially as visitors walk beneath the overhanging roofs that provide cover, that rest on walls at only a few spots, seemingly free, seemingly defying gravity—a worldly miracle.
In Plan I as the final, all indications of conventional structure have been removed—cornices, articulated supports, trim that transitions walls from a base, along with elaborate embellishment without function. The whole construction is a free play of planes. We are liberated from the confining language of past construction, forced exhibition.
In the final construction the partial closing of the left wall provides some separation and cover from the adjacent Alfonso XIII Palace, especially when visitors approach the pool, as well as reinforces the notion of an enclosed interior space. More importantly, while the layout of Plan I is static in many respects, that of the final is active. A full base is suggested from the front, but at the sides it stops just around the left and right corners, and those passing by from an angle will see that. We see a base, we question its full existence and are encouraged to look elsewhere. This is what most gives the design its energy, the assemblage of incomplete parts in dialogue with suggested wholes.
In a similar way we are asked to continue mentally the lines of the walls, yet we have no definite idea where they should stop or turn a corner. How far, for example, should the short front wall extend? Full resolution is left open. Spacing of the interior walls is opened up more, the walls realigned, and there is greater suggestion of the parts of a house, of rooms and corridors, but, again, we don’t know what contains them or sets them apart or what separates interior from exterior. There are lines of tension, however, that unify the design and promote progression—one that goes straight across the top, another that leads from the corner of the pool through the layered and staggered walls of the interior, both leading to the back corner, where Dawn stands. These lines, this tension are not structurally apparent or visible in other ways, though. Rather they have to be imagined as one moves throughout the Pavilion, created through experience. The tensions are subtle, existing at the margins of perception, where introspection begins. However informal and relaxed, it invigorates at the same time, encouraging active thought without terminus. The Pavilion cannot be fully conceived from a frontal glance or ever wholly comprehended.
The office area is fully enclosed, but it is only slightly visible from most angles—and Mies went through many revisions here and was late deciding. I wonder how it was used and how often by visitors.
The two roofs, small to large, near square to rectangle, pose a downward line that counters the diagonal
while the pools reinforce it. These planes are more open and spread apart than those clustered in Plan I. Also the notch at the right, where the forecourt was, breaks the sense of a rectangle as well as emphasizes progression to the back corner. The first step is now covered. Without the forecourt, a projecting step would have been obtrusive.
Any finer analysis of the parts, of proportions and relationships, I suspect, will only get us into trouble.
Use and the whole character of the pool are changed by placing it next to and within walls and close to the front. It can only be approached from two sides, not wholly circled, not conquered, not dismissed with conception.
Visitors are invited instead to walk where they can or sit and contemplate it and the stone behind, along with whatever thoughts the Pavilion has stirred and set free. And view the reflections of the building in the pool, of the trees, of the sky, that shift with movement about the Pavilion, and see the shadows that shift with the coursing sun. With these, whatever thoughts they stir. A reflecting pool becomes a place for reflection. We are taken outside ourselves and beyond. There are more reflections within, among the variously colored, polished marble walls, the walls of glass. Where the Brick Country House achieves projection through the extended garden walls, the Pavilion does so with this endless exchange. In both extension matters.
Somewhere in the back of our minds, opposing, reinforcing our reflections, the figure of Dawn in another pool uncovered yet unapproachable, rising, opening up into a new day, taking us with her,
Dawn herself caught in reflection.
Plan II, similar to the final, also has three statues, with one standing inside the corner of the large pool. Apparently Mies had Dawn in mind in the early stages of planning. It is not known why he dropped the other two.
He had considered early work by Wilhelm Lehmbruck. And it would have had to have been early. Lehmbruck worked in a military hospital during World War I and his later work was affected by that experience.
Falling Man, for example. Mies wanted to look up, move ahead.
It is as intriguing as it is idle to speculate what other two he might have chosen. Likely they would have been figurative, human figures in fact, to contrast with the abstraction of the building itself and add a human presence. Likely they would have been nudes, maintaining a tradition of exposure protected by esthetic context. Having one dressed would break that convention. With what complementing, contrasting guises, which gestures, what expressions? Would one or two be reclining for contrast? Suggesting what? Two more women? A male, or two, to add balance and fuller representation? What interrelationship might they have had? Geometry tells us that three points not on a line can be used to construct a unique circle. What individual differences might they have had that, collectively considered, might move to whole understanding of the face Germany wanted to project to the world, of western culture, of humanity, of our continuing presence on earth? Would they have been meant to represent some ideal human form? Which? How ideal? Dawn is exposed and passive—we know what debates such female nudes engender now. What might have been the discussion then?
With its statue rising up above the black surface of the water it is reminiscent, and certainly this is no accident, of a naos, the cella of a Greek temple, at the end of which the cult image, often likewise inaccessible, was to be found.
Tegethoff
In Dawn we do sense special placement and reference to past practice, perhaps still alive in some sense. The Pavilion is a kind of temple. But as such it is a secular and domestic one, projected universally. Dawn, if a cult image, has no specific name or attributes, invites no rituals nor asks for votive offerings. Retiring, both in placement and demeanor, she merely presents the act of waking without looking at us, without looking anywhere. Literally, she shies away from us. Or rather not retiring but awakening, to what we have no idea. And this is the virtue of Dawn, behind glass from most angles, her image caught in multiple reflections, how little she suggests, in fact deflects ritual practice, any set thought or belief. If Mies didn’t select three statues to project and encircle some whole, it’s because there isn’t one, not one he cared about.
This is the sense of the whole building as built, structurally and thematically, focus and deflection. Essential tensions lead to Dawn and then are released. Three statues spread about would have broken those tensions as visitors might have been motivated to move from one to the other and pay less attention to the building, its structural definitions. Mentally they would have been distracted to some larger thought about what they might have represented, individually, together, away from the design’s essential thrust.
In both plans the Pavilion does have a heart, however, that lies along the diagonal axis before we reach Dawn, the onyx doré wall central to the living area, bold in color, dramatic in its streaks and particles, highly suggestive—and wholly unintelligible. The stone is a fact that only represents itself, yet in its striations and erratic patterns takes us within ourselves, without, without resting. Existence, always active, cannot be contained or reduced.
Plan I, however, with the three statues, without the structural tensions, would have diminished that fact. The onyx wall loses its place in the progression. Small as the differences, Plan I would have created an entirely different building, one more casual, less focused.
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Architecture is the will of the age conceived in spatial terms
Living. Changing. New.
Mies/“Working Theses”/1923
The Barcelona Pavilion, in its abstraction, its open structure, its planar simplification, its challenge to notions of support, was radical for its time and caught the attention of the avant-garde around the world. It became an icon for what Johnson dubbed the International Style. Modernism today, however, is old hat, for many passé, at any rate stands as a tradition more than a century old. The critical reception when it was built does not explain why it remains so fresh today and really doesn’t account for its vitality then.
A case could be made that one of its major strengths lies in how much it references past forms and reinvigorates them, finding a place in the continuum of architecture through the ages, achieving what defines any great work, its ability to create a convincing and engaging structure that assures us as well as stirs, that looks back, locates us in the present, encourages us to look forward.
Instead of a departure, it provided a simplification and clarification away from the aberrant excesses of the day, when the will of the age had become congested into a clutter of interior obsessions, mindless rituals, warped ideologies, and shifting, unstable alignments
that led to the clutter left on the fields of Europe only a dozen years before.
But we know what happened not long after the Pavilion was dismantled.
And we know the clutter of battlefields we see now at home, throughout the world. Has anything changed? Is our thinking any better? Clearer? An election is approaching here—listen to the perversity of thought, the unreality of the discussion, the fractious alliances. We still cling to internal obsessions and external ideas that choke us. We still seek a perfection of one sort or another, unexamined, that crowds or ignores us, that closes us off from and sets us against others.
Quite in contrast to the rationalism so often spoken of in his architecture, he in fact transferred this whole question into the realm of the purely intuitive and aesthetic, one necessarily unapproachable for rational definitions.
Tegethoff
The Pavilion has been praised for its perfection, its exact management of proportions that figures some plan that needs to be revealed. Some saw in the perfect squares that comprise the floor a reasoned grid that placed it in the cosmos. Blaser claimed each had sides a perfect meter and reflected that in his drawing. The squares, however, are 1.1 meters on a side, and some stray from that, slightly larger, slightly smaller. The walls do not rise in clear relationship to that grid, nor do the columns, the columns themselves not placed in a regular arrangement. I don’t think it is known how Mies accounted for these discrepancies, or even if they mattered to him or considered them departures. Even if all were realigned to fit a perfect grid, what is gained? Proportion for Mies came not from external formulas that lead nowhere but from esthetic perception, his internal sense of what was right.
And in many ways the final form was determined not by plan but by accident. The dimensions of the onyx wall were decided by the size of the block Mies happily found. Other exigencies came into play that must have led to concessions. Site had to be negotiated, and there were minor shifts here. Money was tight. Builders ran short of materials. Construction was delayed by questions about funding, then, once resolved, rushed to meet the deadline. It was not built to last.
Perhaps Mies had some Platonic conception in mind had circumstances been different. More likely, the Pavilion we got is the one he intended. Like us, the Barcelona Pavilion is imperfect. Its virtue lies in its recognition, its subtle negotiation and exploration of that fact. In our minds, as we try to conceive the original, or when we visit the actual reconstruction we are given a place to rest, to reflect, to be ourselves, look beyond ourselves, perhaps yet learn to live with each other, at least learn to live.
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Notes/credits
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See also my earlier post Barcelona Pavilion, Meditations, which provides a model of the final construction along with other thoughts. One photograph of that model appears above.
For contrast on all fronts, see argitect’s insightful discussion of Mies’s proposal for the Brussels exhibition in 1934, The Crisis of Monumentality, where, only a few years later, he worked under a different client and radically different assumptions. The plan was violently rejected by Hitler, and Germany pulled out of the exhibition anyway.
In the context of the budding tyrannical political landscape under which this project gestated these questions have an important ethical component: Mies risks looking complacent in the face of overwhelming immorality. But, as Franz Schulze points out, Mies’ willingness to create architecture for any government or movement demonstrates his allegiance to only one thing: Architecture. Mies was trying to survive in difficult financial times . . . while attempting to maintain his influence on the German architectural landscape.
For thought, see Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word:
Mies conceived of building as arising out of a field of tension that consisted of intrinsic lawfulness on one hand and creative freedom on the other. It should afford the “required privacy combined with the freedom of open room forms” and provide a “defining” but not a “confining space” suitable for contemporary living. Behind this concept of space and architecture that defined “building” in a philosophical sense as a “giving form ot reality” stood for Mies the question of the “value and dignity of human existence,” namely: “Is the world as it presents itself bearable for man? . . . . Can it be shaped so as to be worthwhile to live in?”
There’a a debate here. To what extent was Mies rearranging our past notions of order to better suit us and our essential reality? There’s the ghost of Neoplatonism in the Pavilion. Consider also:
An “inner breadth,” an “ability to believe in skepticism,” as Guardini called it—this “infinity that emerges from the spirit” of which Mies spoke—should drive existence from “subjective constraints and arbitrariness” out into the larger perspective of “objective order,” toward “a new self-discovery in the world” that, for Guardini’s philosophy of religion and Mies’s philosophy of architecture, is the proper goal of the human spirit.
Again, extension mattered.
Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses, MIT: 1985, sadly out of print. I take the images of Plan I and the Brick Country House from there. The book, well illustrated and thoroughly researched, analyzes and gives historical background of Mies’s modern home projects, many unbuilt. We see a mind at work in a variety of domestic settings, with a variety of solutions. The projects are as interesting in their solutions as in the architectural ideas they explore. Invention, perhaps, like charity, begins at home. The discussions of the Brick Country House and the Pavilion are especially extensive, where he corrects some of the critical excursions, past and present. I only give brief statement of his critiques.
Clare Newton. in “The Barcelona Pavilion—Real and Imagined,” gives a full, carefully argued review of decisions made in the reconstruction as well as adds much factual information about the original construction I have not seen elsewhere.
Frontal photograph of the reconstructed Pavilion via QOCA Architecture. My first photograph places the model in its backdrop. Note the scale of the two images is different. Corrected, Plan 1 would be longer.
Black and white photographs of the large pool and Dawn reflected in the windows, both cropped, ©Cemal Emden via Divisare. These and his other pictures are exceptional, the best way to become acquainted with the reconstruction of the pavilion without going there and in many ways exceed what we might find in a visit.
Site plan, cropped, via fundació mies van der rohe barcelona. I assume this is a plan of the original installation.
There are a host of plans online of the Pavilion, some taken from the reconstruction. I’m not certain how accurate this one is. Note it has doors, which Mies didn’t want. I couldn’t find a complete one of the Pavilion as built. Tegethoff provides a platform paving blueprint that shows the actual size of the paving stones, their variations.
Photograph of entrance, with columns, via Wikimedia Commons.
Aerial Barcelona exhibition photograph from BarcelonaYellow.
Exhibition photograph of Pavilion next to the palace via Twentieth Century Architecture. Here you will find full discussion and many pictures.
Dawn statue (Alba) in corner photograph, cropped and converted to black and white, via Wikimedia Commons. Morning is another translation of alba. Note alba refers to a state, not a specific person (cf. Athena) and I’m reading as a personal name it is unisex.
Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Emporsteigender Jüngling (Rising Youth) 1913 via Wikimedia Commons.
Lehmbruck, Falling Man, via Kulturstiftung.
Onyx wall photo in the reconstruction via Wikimedia Commons.
Die Wohnung poster of the 1927 Werkbund exhibition via Bard Graduate Center. Mies was director of the Werkbund at the time and had work in the show.
This poster by German artist-designer Willi Baumeister (1889–1955) announces with an unequivocal red “X” that ornate interior decoration no longer has a place in modern life. The poster advertises Die Wohnung (The Dwelling), an exhibition of architecture organized by the German association of manufacturers and designers known as Deutscher Werkbund, and adds a cryptic question: wie wohnen? (How should we live?).
Taryn Clary
WWI photograph, “Stretcher bearers and dressers, utterly exhausted, fall asleep in the mud on the battlefield, ca. 1917,” via Wikimedia Commons.
Photograph of destruction in Gaza via cnn.com.