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.
