BARCELONA PAVILION
Mies van Der Rohe designed the Pavilion as an entrance, and as a representative of Germany for their participation in the 1929 International Exposition. He was commissioned to construct all of the German structures after his role in leading the group of architects who came together to complete the Weissenhofsiedlung, a residential urban housing complex in the German City of Stuttgart. Mies had become a leader in the modernization of architecture for his role in developing an avantegarde international architecture. [ 1 ]
Post World War I , Germany was looking to represent itself as a democratic, culturally progressive, prospering, and thoroughly pacifist society. Georg von Schnitzler, the man whom commissioned Mies, requested an architecture which would give, "voice to the spirit of a new era".[ 1 ] Not a small responsibility. But as a result, Mies would develop two modern concepts, the "Free plan"
and the "Floating roof". [ 1 ]
Mies directed that the space be left bare, with no exhibits, to act as a threshold, reshaping traditional architectural elements to blur the line between interior + exterior, and create a promenade throughout the site. The lack of programmatic planning enabled Mies to treat the pavilion as a continuous space; as a path.
"The design was predicated on an absolute distinction between structure and enclosure—a regular grid of cruciform steel columns interspersed by freely spaced planes". [ 2 ]
The plan is actually composed of both freely spaced nonstructural partition wall planes and load bearing concrete walls clad with marble tile. Mies utilizes minimalist detailing of extruded sheet metal to emphasize each continuous plane. The elongated corridors were created to directly influence the path through the site to the Poble Espanyol, a contemporary art museum in Barcelona.
These images depict the reconstructed historical replication of Mies's Barcelona Pavilion. The original structure was demolished less than a year after completion, at the end of the Exposition. From 1983 to 1986, architect Oriol Bohigas, as head of the Urban Planning Department at the Barcelona City Council commissioned architects Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos to supervise the reconstruction of the Pavilion.
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1. ^Davey, J.; Zhen, C. (2015).
Wimdu City Guides: No. 2 Barcelona: Barcelona Travel Guide. Wimdu City Guides. p. 10. Retrieved June 8, 2016
2. ^Bramblett, R. (2005). Europe For Dummies. Dummies Travel (in Spanish). Wiley. p. 523. Retrieved June 8, 2016.