Mies Missing Materiality Installation / Anna & Eugeni Bach

Curated by Clara Ott
INSTALLATION, TEMPORARY INSTALLATIONS, MONUMENTS • BARCELONA, SPAIN
Architects : Anna & Eugeni Bach
Year : 2018
Photographs : Adrià Goula
Lead Architect : Anna & Eugeni Bach
Collaborators : Albert Cabrer
Promotor : Fundació Mies van der Rohe
Construction Company : Demibold, SL
City : Barcelona
Country : Spain

Dressing the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion to strip it of its materiality. This easy act turns the Pavilion right into a illustration of itself that opens the door to a number of interpretations about facets like the worth of the unique, the position of the white floor as a picture of modernity, and the significance of materiality within the notion of house.

The Pavilion in Barcelona upon which we act is a reconstruction, a reproduction so devoted to the unique that it’s usually tough to recollect its true nature. A building that ought to have been non permanent was immortalised first by the written account of the fashionable motion and later by its personal reconstruction.

Turning the Pavilion into the picture of itself, with all of the surfaces restricted to the identical materials, reveals the building’s consultant position each that of the unique, as a nationwide image, and that of the duplicate, by representing the previous. For a time, the Pavilion would be the longest-standing 1:1 scale mock-up of the duplicate of the non permanent pavilion in fashionable architecture. Eradicating a part of the materiality from the Pavilion additionally raises different interpretations associated to the historiography of 20th-century architecture.

The Pavilion in Barcelona was enthroned as an icon of modernity on the ‘Fashionable Architecture’ exhibition on the MoMA in New York in 1932. The exhibition catalog presents numerous buildings by architects like Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Neutra, Wright, Oud, Gropius, and others by a number of images and important essays during which Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock point out the homogenising standards for combining all of the works by the identical lens. These embrace the white floor as an emblem of a brand new architecture, which seems as one of the vital insistent.

To offer the Pavilion in Barcelona with that homogenising whiteness means to endow it with one of many defining options of contemporary historiography (not of modernity). But on the identical time, it additionally entails stripping the Pavilion of its materiality and its distinctive traits—particularly the one which erected it as an icon of the fashionable motion. The set up turns this paradox into an expertise. It helps guests to think about these concepts and plenty of extra by their very own expertise in a pavilion that can lose its materiality for a number of days to imagine all its consultant potential.

It permits us to mirror on transversal facets like the worth of imperfection, in an altered pavilion that seems neat and immaculate on the primary day, however that reveals all of the traces of want after days of visits. It reinforces the interpretation of the Pavilion as a temple of the German soul, now white, though nonetheless devoid of its eight columns on the entry facade. We are able to examine it with the picture of that mannequin product of white material that Mies supposedly made for the Kröller-Müller household. Moreover, it reveals us the ability of the boards, now completely seen by the disappearance of the textures and reflections that hid them and that reminds us of one of many views or collages so attribute of Mies, a collage by which we now can stroll. An set up that, in brief, works as a set off for reflection.

Robinson Adey

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