Barcelona Pavilion
VRA Core
Title
Barcelona Pavilion
German Pavilion
Agent
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (German architect, 1886-1969)
Location
Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Date
1929 (creation)
1986 (creation)
20th century
Style Period
Bauhaus
Modernist
Cultural Context
German
Worktype
buildings
exhibition buildings
Material
steel
glass
marble
travertine
onyx
Technique
construction (assembling)
Subject
Architecture and City Planning
Description
View of the main terrace and the reflecting pool
It was not until 1929 that the ideas of the earlier experimental period were finally realized in one of the most important buildings of the Modern Movement, the German (or Barcelona) Pavilion (destroyed
reconstructed 1986), Montjuïc, Barcelona. It was a last-minute addition to the German section of the Exposición Internacional in Barcelona in 1929 for which Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich (with whom he collaborated on exhibition projects) had been given overall design responsibility by the government in 1928. Here Mies van der Rohe used the open (decellurized) plan as an architectural analogy of the social and political openness to which the new German republic aspired. Space-defining elements were dissociated from the structural columns, planning was free and open, merging interior and exterior spaces: unbroken podium and roof planes were held apart by a regular grid of slender cruciform steel columns, giving a clear field for spatial design, using opaque, translucent and transparent walls freely disposed between the columns. These ideas were crucial to all his subsequent work. The rich materials of the space-defining walls, the reflecting pools-in one of which stands a sculpture by Georg Kolbe-and the furniture that he designed specifically for the pavilion (the well-known Barcelona chair, stools and table), all added to the architectonic qualities in a building of great poetic beauty.
Rights
© Javier Gomez
ID
GOMEZAT4511
Source
Javier Gomez
State Edition
35 mm slides
Collection
Citation
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, Barcelona Pavilion, 1929 (creation), Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, TTU Arch Design Images. Image Source: Javier Gomez. https://archimage.lib.ttu.edu/items/show/11759.
Item Relations
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