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Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion

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Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion

Author(s): George Dodds
Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 39 (Spring, 2001), pp. 168-191
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology
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168 RES 39 SPRING 2001

Figure 3. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, German Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain, 1928-1929. Photograph courtesy of the
Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Exterior of Pavilion, looking south (MMA 1554)
Berliner Bild-Bericht.

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 Body in pieces
Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion
GEORGE DODDS
[I]n the artwork the meaning of the object takes on spatial
appearance, whereas in photography the spatial appearance
of an object is its meaning.
Sigfried Kracauer, "Photography"
[T]here is no longer a system of objects. The critique of
objects was based on signs saturated with meaning, along
with their phantasies and unconscious logic as well as their
. . . differential logic. Behind this dual logic lies the
anthropological dream: the dream of the object as existing
beyond and above . . . use, above and beyond . . .
symbolic exchange.
Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication
There was one kind of fame before the invention of
photographs, and another kind thereafter.
Milan Kundera, Slowness
Surface and desire
In "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter
Benjamin explains that while the historicist looks to
history for an inevitable unfolding of events, the
historical materialist looks at historical events, asking
what about them is of interest today.1 One of the central
questions I consider in this essay is what is it about the
Barcelona Pavilion that is of interest to us today?why
does it continue to fascinate architects and historians?
What compels us, after such a long time, to read and
write about a work that existed for such a short time and
about which its designer seemed apathetic? Certainly, the
re-building of the pavilion is, in part, responsible for a
renewed interest in an old news item. This is evinced by
Pierre Adler of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at MoMA assisted in
retrieving and identifying archival materials for this paper. Joseph
Rykwert and Caroline Constant reviewed numerous drafts, helping to
shape this paper's form and content. William Braham, Marcia
Feuerstein, Daniel Naegele, and Alex Wall assisted with suggestions of
source materials and perspectives.
1. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in
Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253-267.
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approximately three hundred articles and more than two
dozen books published on Mies since the reconstruction,
literally doubling the combined literature of the previous
seventy years. Yet this only partially explains an
insatiable interest that does not seem to be, in Benjamin's
terms, "historically determined." The story of the
Barcelona Pavilion is intrinsically related to the medium
through which it has been primarily apprehended, before
its demolition and after?photography. Sigfried Kracauer's
observation on the cultural meaning of photography
helps illuminate this proposition.
Kracauer's "Photography," was published in the daily
newspaper Die Frankfurter Zeitung in 1927?two years
before Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), the head
of propaganda and exhibitions for the November
Gruppe, was commissioned to design the Deutscher
Reichspavillon for he 1929 International Exhibition in
Barcelona. Reflecting on the fundamental questions of
authenticity and truth-value, Kracauer compares
photographic images with memory images that result
from direct human contact. For Kracauer, the latter has
the status of the "ur-image," while the veracity of a
photographic image is inherently specious. Like the
Barcelona Pavilion, over time the ur-image decays or is
destroyed?all that remains are the photographs.
Kracauer explains:
Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal)
continuum; memory images retain what is given only so far
as it has significance. Since what is significant is not
reducible to either merely spatial or. . . temporal terms,
memory images are at odds with photographic
representation. . . . The meaning of memory images are
linked to their truth content. ... In a photograph, . . .
history is buried under a layer of snow.2
The history of the photographic life of the Barcelona
Pavilion is an analogue for Kracauer's paradox. While
the photographic image seems to objectively
2. Sigfried Kracauer, "Photography," in The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1995), pp. 50-51.
 170 RES 39 SPRING 2001
P^V^JaflaB^BB^BB^BB^BB^BB^air^^i^'X * W_
tB^B^B^^Safc?^^^,^^ "? * a?tl
BB^B^B^B^BBbE?^' : ' '^^^SHffH^BB^B^B^B^Bl
II^VI^S^^?^Hb.^B^HHhI?.^?b1
?*f>^*Fi Bm9^b^b^b^b^H
"*??*( : v" ik^^B^^^B> a^Fl^^ *yF39Hb^b^b1
Figure 1. Excavation of original 1929 building by Sol?
Morales et. al. Courtesy of Fundaci?n Mies van der Rohe,
Barcelona, Spain.
"document" an event or thing, one question always
remains unanswered?what is it that the photograph
documents? The history of the pavilion operates within
this paradox?buried beneath a snowy layer that can
neither be blown way nor melted under the heat of
intense study. Comparing the "portrait painter" with the
photographer, Kracauer explains, "In order for history to
present itself, the mere surface coherence offered by
photography must be destroyed. For in the artwork the
meaning of the object takes on spatial appearance,
whereas in photography the spatial appearance of an
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object is its meaning."3 To understand the fame of the
Barcelona Pavilion, it is necessary to first recognize it as
less a history than the retelling of "an anthropological
dream." Milan Kuderna posits that photography (and its
subsequent digital permutations) has unalterably
changed the nature of fame. "There was one kind of
fame before the invention of photographs, and another
kind thereafter." The history of the Barcelona Pavilion is
the story of this other kind of fame.
Two decades ago the remains of one of the most
influential and enigmatic buildings of the modern
movement were exhumed?the initial phase of the well
publicized reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion by
Cristian Cirici, Fernando Ramos and Ignasi de Sol?
Morales (fig. 1).4 Prior to unearthing the column
fragments and foundations there was no physical
evidence that the pavilion had ever existed save for a
limited number of preliminary drawings and
photographs. The Berliner Bild-Bericht master prints
housed in the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the
Museum of Modern Art are arguably the most
historically significant of these documents (fig. 2).5 The
thirteen master prints have been reproduced in virtually
every monograph and article on Mies's work, and in
most of the early surveys of modern architecture (fig. 3).
So pervasive is the influence of these prints that there
are only a handful of instances where photographs other
than the Bild-Bericht prints were published during Mies's
career, all of which were prior to his immigration to the
United States (fig. 4).6 After Mies's relocation to Chicago,
3. Ibid., p. 52.
4. Ignasi de Sol?-Morales, Cristian Grid, and Fernando Ramos,
Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1993).
5. There are fourteen prints in the Mies van der Rohe Archive of the
Museum of Modern Art with the imprint, Berliner Bild-Bericht W. 30,
Eisenacher Str. 103, Berlin. There are two pair of duplicates from the
same negative; one pair is marked Seidman 247, the other is MMA
1180. One of the MMA 1180 prints has been hand-painted to conceal
imperfections in the ceiling that are apparent on the unmarked print.
This is discussed below. These are master prints, from which MoMA
has made copy negatives. Neither MoMA nor Mies seems to have ever
possessed the original negatives. Most of the Bild-Bericht prints vary in
size and proportion, evidence of cropping. The photographs were part
of the collection from Mies's office that was bequeathed to the
Museum of Modern Art in 1968. See Franze Schulze, Mies van der
Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1985), p. 319.
6. The official catalogue from the 1929 exposition published in
Barcelona includes some uncharacteristically populated non-Berliner
Bild-Bericht photographs. Also see Alfredo Baeschlin, "Barcelona und
 Dodds: Body in pieces 1 71

and until his death in 1969, the only photographic

images of the pavilion that Mies gave permission to print
were the Bild-Bericht master prints.
The sedimentation of mythology built-up around the
Barcelona Pavilion during the past seventy years has
resulted in a virtual labyrinth of interpretations. Each of
these attempt in some way to codify the Bild-Bericht
?mages, often bolstering polemical readings of not only
Mies's oeuvre, but the foundations of the International
Style and the modern movement. This accumulated
scholarship often reads like an oscillating field of
disparate and at times mutually exclusive propositions in
which even the final disposition of the body of the
building is disputed territory. There are still students of
architecture who learn either through rumor or course
work that the material components of the pavilion were
crated-up and shipped back Berlin where they may
remain lost and unclaimed.7 This apocryphal story was,
in part, the inspiration for Rem Koolhaas and his Office
for Metropolitan Architecture's (OMA) "reconstruction"
of the pavilion for the 1985 Trienalle in Milan, which I
return to later in this paper
Owing to the Barcelona Pavilion's demolition in
January 1930, seven months after its opening, the Figure 2. Construction of new Barcelona Pavilion by Sola
number of architects and historians who visited the Morales et. al. (1986). Courtesy of Fundaci?n Mies van der
building was limited.8 This includes Philip Johnson, who Rohe, Barcelona, Spain.

Seine Weltausstellung," Deutsche Bauzeitung (September 25, 1929):

657-659 and Nicholas M. Rubio i Tudur?, "Le Pavillon de l'Allemagne
a l'Exposition de Barcelone," Cahiers d'Art 8-9 (1929):408-411.
7. One of the most influential of these sources of this rumor, at
least in print, is Peter Blake. "[T]he Barcelona Pavilion was dismantled
at the close of the exhibition and shipped back to Germany in pieces.
Where it ended up, Mies was never able to discover." Peter Blake,
Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Structure (New York: Penguin
Books, 1960), p. 55.
8. The pavilion was visited and written about, nonetheless, by a
number of important writers including Enrico Carlo Rava and Nicholas
M. Rubio i Tudur?. Rava was an important polemicist for modernism
and rationalism in Italy prior to World War II and Rubio i Tudur? was
the local landscape architect who collaborated on the design of the
Barcelona exposition grounds with Forestier?later becoming one of
the most important landscape architects of his generation in Spain.
Enrico Carlo Rava, "Il padiglione de Mies van der Rohe a Barcellona,"
Domus (Marzo 1931). See Rubio i Tudur? (see note 6). Juan Pablo
Bonta divided the literature on the Pavilion into eight discrete stages.
The first of these stages is "Blindness" in which Bonta describes how
the pavilion was ignored by a number of significant historians
including Sigfried Giedion until after the W.W.IL. Juan Pablo Bonta, An
Anatomy of Architectural Interpretation: A Semiotic Review of the
Criticism of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (Barcelona:
Gustavo Gili, 1975), p. 57.
lived in a Mies van der Rohe-designed apartment and,
by way of organizing two major exhibitions at MoMA,
"effectively introduced [Mies] to the New World."9 His
opinions of the pavilion, therefore, had far more
authority than did other writers. Curiously, although he
was traveling in Europe at the time of the Barcelona
Exposition and had access to numerous published
reports of both the exposition and the pavilion, he
inexplicably failed to visit either.10 When Johnson
comments in his 1947 MoMA monograph that the
pavilion's space "is channeled rather than confined?it
is never stopped, but is allowed to flow continuously,"
his description of a seemingly in situ experience is
based on the evidence of an inaccurate plan, other
authors, and the Bild-Bericht photographs.11
9. Schulze (see note 5), p. 178.
10. Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York:
Knopf, 1994).
11. Philip C. Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, 1947), p. 58.

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 172 RES 39 SPRING 2001

LE PAMLLOiN DE L'ALLEMAGNE
A L'EXPOSITION DE BARCELONE
i?.\K .Mies van dew Rohe
Il ne renferme que de l'espace. Il n'a pas de foui
pratique, de fonction mat?rielle. U*s gens disent :
? ?a ne sert A rien ?. C'est ?le l'architecture repr?
sentative, comme un ob?lisque ou un arc de triomphe.
Certains architectes, pour repr?senter l'Allemagne,
? l'aide d'une sorte de construction commemorative,
auraient probablement rappel?, dans cette construc
tion, In forme d'un (iros dirigeable. Mies van der Hohe.
Elus subtil,
i forme a donne
tranquille ? son monument repr?sentatif,
d'une maison.
Certes, on n'est plus d'accord sur ce que c'est (pie
? la forme d'une maison t. Lorsque vous b?tissez une
vraie maison, elle reste une maison, quel que soit
l'aspect que vous lui imposez. Muis, si vous Ta ?les
quelque chose qui n'est pas une maison, mais veut
lui ressembler, tl faut que vous cherchiez ? rapprocher
votre ?difice des formes bien connues de l'architec
ture de la maison. Voil?, donc un ?l?ment ? tradi
tionnel ?, un principe conservateur, que nous ne
devons pas ignorer et que nous retrouvons, tr?s
marqu?, dans le pavillon de Mies van der Hohe.
Des touristes et des indig?nes d'extr?me avant-garde,
ont pu le lui reprocher : ? Ce pavillon n'est pus tout
? fait dernier cri >. Ils en ont voulu ? l'architecte.
ils oui dit qu'il ne faut pas apporter des sous
twiwrmttcs aux Expositions Internat tonales. Mais je
laisse ces avis et je reviens ? mon sujet.
U' Pavillon ne renferme que de l'espace et encore
est-ce d'une fa?on g?om?trique et non pas r?elle ou
physique. Il n'a pus de portes et, bien plus, chaque
salle n'est ferm?e qu'imparfaitement, sur trois c?t?s,
par trois parois, par exemple. Ces parois sont, le plus
souvent. ?le grandes vitres continues qui ne limitent
l'espace que d'une fa?on partielle. Quelques-unes de
ces vitres, de teinte sombre et neutre, refl?tent les
objets et les gens, de telle sorte que ce que vous
voyez ? travers la vitre se confond avec ce que vous
y voyez de refl?t?. Certaines des salles manquent de
plafond : ce sont des vrais demi palios, o? l'espace
n'est limit? que par trois murs et par la surface hori
zontale de l'eau d'un bassin, mais o? il est ? retenu ?
par la g?om?trie.
lorsque vous approchez du Pavillon, puis, lorsque
vous y entrez, vous ?tes frapp? de cette impression
d'inutilit? qui se d?gage de ces sidles ouvertes et
vides, tie ces beaux murs en marbre, nus et d?serts,
de ces ?tatio.* inhabitables ; et vous ressentez, aussit?t,
le choc de l'architecture m?taphysique, si j'ose dire.

Figure 4. Rage 409, Cahiers d'Art, 8-9 (1929). Exterior of Pavilion looking northwest
(MMA 16737). Courtesy of Cahiers d'Art, Paris, France and the Mies van der Rohe
Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Before it was dismantled, however, a small but
significant number of articles published in Europe and
the United States had rendered the Barcelona Pavilion
into one of the most potent images of European
modernism, setting the stage for its eventual elevation to
that of cultural icon.12 In 1979 the National Gallery of
Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C. marked the fiftieth
12. Among the few articles published while the pavilion was still
standing, the two most cited authors in the Barcelona Pavilion

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anniversary of the pavilion with an exhibition, the
contents of which was largely photographic.13 A few
years later Mies's centenary was celebrated with
symposia, exhibitions and the publication of more than
three hundred articles and books, doubling the
literature of the previous sixty years combined. The
effect of the NGA's exhibit and Mies's centenary created
a renewed interest in the architect and the original
pavilion?the most tangible result of which is the
rebuilding of the pavilion. Following the completion of
the Sola-Morales reconstruction, the pavilion continues
to be a highly plastic object of interpretation. For some,
the pavilion is one of the most contextual and site
specific of Mies's European buildings. Others have
literature are Walther Genzmer and Guido Harbers. See Walther
Genzmer's, "Die internationale Ausstellung in Barcelona," Zentralblatt
der Bauverwaltung 49, no. 34 (August 21, 1929):541-546 and "Der
Deutsche Reichspavillon auf der Internationlen Ausstelung Barcelona,"
Die Baugilde 11, no. 20 (October 25, 1929):1654-1657; Guido
Harbers, "Deutscher Reichspavillon in Barcelona auf der
Internationalen Ausstellung 1929," Der Baumeister 27, no. 11
(November, 1929):421-425. For a complete citation of articles and
books published prior to 1979, see David A. Spaeth, Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe: An Annotated Bibliography and Chronology (New York:
Garland, 1979).
13. The National Gallery of Art exhibition is documented in the
fourteen-page pamphlet that accompanied the exhibit, ostensibly
written by the exhibition director, Ludwig Glaeser, then the Curator of
the MoMA Mies van der Rohe Archive. See Mies van der Rohe: The
Barcelona Pavilion 50th Anniversary (New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1979), unpaginated. Mies's biographer, Franz Schulze,
reviewed the exhibit. See Franz Schulze, "The Barcelona Pavilion
Returns," Art in America (November 1979):98-103.
14. The argument in favor of reading the pavilion as an
autonomous object is recorded in Sol?-Morales et al. (see note 4): 28.
Wolf Tegethoff is the first of recent critics to argue that Mies conceived
the pavilion as a site-contingent project. Tegethoff maintains that the
ascent up the Montju?c hillside (including the existing steps), the axis
of the fairgrounds, the edge of the King Alfonso XIII Pavilion and the
existing road were all contingencies to which Mies adapted his
project. Following Tegethoff, K. Michael Hays argues that the pavilion
is engaged in a subtle dialogue with its context. See K. Michael Hays,
"Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form," Perspecta 21
(1984):15-29. Although Tegethoff and Hays suggest that the pavilion
would have worked as a kind of propyleum to the ascent to the
Spanish Village above, this is not supported by any of the first-hand
accounts of the exposition which describe the use of funiculars and
trams as the primary way of moving around the hot, expansive and
steeply sloping site of the fairgrounds. Wolf Tegethoff, Mes van der
Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985),
pp. 85-89. In particular, Tegethoff cites Walther Genzmer's article of
1929. See Genzmer (see note 12), "Der Deutche Reichspavillon."
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Dodds: Body ?n pieces 1 73
argued with equal persuasiveness that it was a placeless
and autonomous object and that its reconstruction
could be sited anywhere in that the original was
unfettered by distinctions of place.14 Although it was
the vanguard of what Hitchcock and Johnson called the
International Style, it is also characterized as a critique
of the foundations upon which that movement was
based.15 It is both the emblem of Germany's post-war
appeasement, and the foreshadowing of Nazi
totalitarianism.16
Having achieved the status of a virtual ur-hut of
modernity, it is the one building by Mies about which
the least can be said with certainty.17 The Barcelona
Pavilion was built, yet it is often discussed in the
literature as if it were an unrealized or "theoretical"
project. Its construction was of materials with specific
properties and measurements, yet its character and even
its precise dimensions have proved as mutable as its
image is ubiquitous.18 The extreme plasticity of these
interpretations notwithstanding, there are some issues
about which most authors agree. Perhaps the most
pervasive of these is an emphasis on what is absent
from, rather than what is present in, the pavilion.
Centers, edges, stairs, doors, exits, curtains, shadows
and even bodies?in all of these accounts, something
15. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International
Style: Architecture Since 1922 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1932). Also
see Hays (see note 14).
16. The first article to discuss the German Pavilion as a
representation of Germany's appeasement was Rubio ? Tudur?'s, "Le
Pavillon de l'Allemagne a l'Exposition de Barcelone" (see note 6). In
opposition, see Jos? Quetglas, "Fear of Glass: The Barcelona Pavilion,"
in Architectureproduction, ed. Beatriz Colomina, Revisions: Papers on
Architectural Theory and Criticism, vol. 2. (Princeton: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1988), pp. 148-150. Also see by the same author
an expanded version of this essay, Fear of Glass: Mies van der Rohe's
Pavilion in Barcelona (Basel: Birkh?user, 2001). Among Quetglas's
amendments to his earlier essay he expands upon Mies's little
discussed relation to Dada of which the Barceona Pavilion is Mies's
most subtle demonstration.
17. See Jean-Francois Chevrier, Allan Sekula, and Benjamin H. D.
Buch loh, Walker Evans and Dan Graham (Rotterdam: Witte de With
and New York: Center for Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of
American Art, 1992). Also see Gregg Bleam, "The Work of Dan
Kiley," in Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review, ed.
Marc Trieb (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 230. Kiley cites the
Barcelona Pavilion as a primary influence in the design of his thesis
project at the Harvard GSD and later in a series of garden designs
spanning his career. Ibid., p. 231.
18. See Sol?-Morales et al.(see note 4), pp. 13, 26.
174 RES 39 SPRING 2001
Figure 5. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, German Pavilion,
Barcelona, Spain, 1928-1929. Photograph courtesy of the
Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Detail of (Seidman 167) showing Kolbe figure through
the tinted glass wall, 1929.
invariably seems to be missing?but the bodies are,
perhaps, the most troubling. While architectural
photographers typically shoot their subjects empty, in
the Bild-Bericht photographs the absence of human
figures is almost palpable. Built "in the form of a house,"
these photographs show no trace of domesticity. The
Kolbe sculpture of the female nude notwithstanding, this
is a house where no-body ever seems to be home (fig. 5).19
19. The quote, in context reads, "Some architects, in order to
represent Germany, with the assistance of a kind of commemorative
construction, would have probably recalled, in this construction, the
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Underscoring this absence, the beauty and precision
of the pavilion's highly reflective surfaces, as depicted in
the Bild-Bericht photographs, is another commonplace
of post-centenary criticism. In these sepia master prints,
particularly the interior views, it is often difficult to
isolate the physical body of the pavilion from the images
reflected on its surfaces. Like the strategically placed
mirrors in the library of Umberto Eco's The Name of the
Rose, the timeless perfection of the pavilion's mirror-like
walls, preserved in the Bild-Bericht prints, generate what
appears to be a kind of delirium in those who attempt to
interpret the image of this building. Throughout the
various iconographies the reader invariably encounters
an unstable image of a dream-like place where walls are
equated with plant materials, ceilings are equated with
floors and doors offer neither protection nor exit.20 My
intention is not so much to set the record straight, but
rather to help understand the nature of this record that is
inextricably linked to a modest number of canonical
photographs, the quantity of which is inversely
proportional to the influence they have had on
twentieth-century modernism. The images reflected in
the Bild-Bericht prints must be understood, not only as
the figure of a building but also as the reflection of a
desire?a collective desire to inhabit the unstable image
of what has become, during this century, a reoccurring
dream of modernity (fig. 6).21
form of a fat dirigible. Mies van der Rohe, more subtle, has given to
his representational monument, the tranquil form of a house. Indeed,
one is no longer in agreement on what is 'the form of a house.' When
you build a 'real' house, it remains a house, whatever aspect you may
impose on it. But, if you make something that is not a house, but
wants to resemble it, it is necessary to seek to bring your building
close towards the well known building forms of domestic
architecture." Rubio i Tudur? (see note 6), p. 409. All translations are
by the author except where noted.
20. Iconography is used here in the sense that Focillon defines it.
"Iconography may be understood [as] either the variation of forms
upon the same meaning, or the variation of meanings upon the same
form. . . . And sometimes form, although it has become entirely void
of meaning, will not only survive long after the death of its content,
but will even unexpectedly and richly renew itself." Henri Focillon,
The Life of Forms in Art (1934) (New York: George Wittenborn, Inc.,
1948), p. 4.
21. On the effects of the medium of photography on our
understanding of architecture, see Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and
Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1994). Although Colomina focuses on the works of Le Corbusier
and Adolf Loos, she recognizes the need to understand Mies through
the photographic representation of his work. See Beatriz Colomina,
"Mies Not," in The Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Merlins (Princeton:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 193-221.
 Dodds: Body in pieces 1 75

Figure 6. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, German Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain, 1928-1929.
Photograph courtesy of the Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Interior view of main space looking toward Kolbe statue and small reflecting pool. (Seidman 167)
Berliner Bild-Bericht.

Buildings and photographs of buildings
The Berliner Bild-Bericht prints of the Barcelona
Pavilion have been published so often, in so many
different guises, that it is problematic to continue viewing
them as simply the neutral, visual, documentation of a
historically influential building. Having once conveyed
information in the conventional sense ofthat word, these
images have become, in effect, worn out. Echoing
Kracauer, Giulio Carlo Argan argues, "the image which is
worn out," is one that has been "consumed, recited for
the thousandth time . .. [and] contaminated by ingenious
associations, combinations, or even by banal confusions ...
with other latent images in the memory.. . ." 22 For
22. Giulio Carlo Argan, "Ideology and Iconography," in The
Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1980), p. 17. Similarly, Henri Focillon called images
like the Bild-Bericht prints, empty or "void" forms. See Focillon (see
note 20).
Argan, the worn out image operates in the "culture of
the diffused image."23 In this culture of the diffused
image it is no longer possible to subject such images to
discrete iconographie analyses independent of the
history of their interpretation.24 The meaning of the Bild
Bericht photographs, therefore, must be considered not
only ?conographically, but iconologically as well. They
are part of a tradition of images and the interpretations
of those images.25 The chances of conflating the reality
23. Argan (see note 22).
24. Baudrillard describes the "Precession of Simulacra," as a
passage in which, "signs of the real [are substituted] for the real itself.
. ." Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), n.d.), p. 4.
25. "The work of the iconologist is completely different from that
of he ?conographer; the latter describes the connotations of the figure
as an entomologist describes the characteristics of an insect; the
former synthesizes, not analyzes, because he reconstructs the previous
existence of the image and demonstrates the necessity of its rebirth in

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 176 RES 39 SPRING 2001

Figure 7. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, German Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain, 1928-1929.
Photograph courtesy of the Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Kolbe figure in small reflecting pool (MMA 1180) Berliner Bild-Bericht.

of the photographs with the building they ostensibly
depict increases the less one recognizes the diffused
status of the particular tradition of ?mages of which the
Bild-Bericht prints are part.
In his study of Mies van der Rohe's country houses,
Wolf Tegethoff, for example, argues that the pavilion is
intrinsically connected to its setting.
Nature here extended almost symbolically onto the
structure itself, causing the boundaries to blur.... The
dark green veining of the Tinos marble blended visually
with the surrounding cypresses and conifers, appearing to
be the architectural crystallization of their organic forms. In
that present absolute which is the work of art." Argan (see note 22), p.
18. Also see, Erwin Ranofsky, "Iconography and Iconology : An
Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art," in Meaning in the Visual
Arts (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 26-54. First
published in, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of
the Renaissance (New York, Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 3-31.
the surviving photographs this is particularly apparent from
the way in which the plants on the shadowed north side
can scarcely be distinguished from the wall.26
As if to underscore the difficulty of distinguishing
between the building and its representation, Tegethoff
adds, "The original is clearer on this point than the copy,
since a certain loss of depth in the process of
duplication is virtually unavoidable "(fig. 7).27The
"original" in this case is not to the building depicted in
the photograph, of course, but the Bild-Bericht master
print of the building.
The photograph Tegethoff cites is one of the most
frequently published Bild-Bericht prints, in the MoMA
archive (MMA 1180). It is a long view of the smaller of
the two reflecting pools. A tinted glass wall borders the
26. Tegethoff (see note 14), p. 87.
27. Ibid., n. 80.

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 Dodds: Body in pieces 1 77

left; on the right, the upright Kolbe figure is reflected in

the marble and glass walls of the court and the calm
surface of the water. In the version of the photograph
reproduced in the Tegethoff book, the foliage and the
wall appear similar in texture and tone, apparently
supporting his claim.28 Reproductions of the print in
other publications demonstrate that the larger and
grainier the enlargement, the closer in tonal value the
wall and vegetation appear (fig. 8). Yet the published
color photographs of the reconstruction and the
anecdotal evidence of visitors to the Sola-Morales
pavilion suggest an opposite reading. The similarity
between the three-dimensional vegetation and the two
dimensional veining of the Alpine (not Tinian) marble
wall is largely a function of the homogenizing effect of
black and white photographic image.29 Tegethoff
projects his own desire to see a connection between the
pavilion and its physical context, attributing the visual
characteristics of black and white photography and
photographic enlargement onto the physical character of
the building.30

28. Among the articles written on the Pavilion prior to Mies's

immigration to the United States, Raymond McGrath is the only author
to mention the relationship of the vegetation to the pavilion, citing the
reflection of the foliage in the pavilion's glass walls. Like Tegethoff,
McGrath bases his observation on the visual evidence of the Bild
Figure 8. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, German Pavilion,
Bericht photographs. Raymond McGrath, "Looking into Glass," Barcelona, Spain, 1928-1929. Photograph courtesy of the
Architectural Review 71 (January 1932):30. Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New
29. The recent excavation of the original building has revealed,
York. Detail of marble wall and vegetation beyond in small
however, that Tinos marble was used in the interior freestanding wall
reflecting pool (MMA 1180) Berliner Bild-Bericht.
one sees upon first entering the pavilion from the plaza/road side. The
perimeter was, in fact, made of an Alpine marble from the Valle
d'Aosta, with a different color and veining. See Sola-Morales (see note
4), p. 13.
30. Caroline Constant uses the same visual evidence regarding the
relation of the pavilion to its surrounding vegetation to conclude, "the
For Walter Benjamin, the photographic enlargement
lustrous green Tinian marble in the inner court echoes the cluster of or close-up was a way of making the familiar unfamiliar,
trees beyond, affirming the distance between architecture and nature." expanding space and revealing "entirely new structural
Caroline Constant, "The Barcelona Pavilion as Landscape Garden: formations of the subject."31 Benjamin posits that the
Modernity and the Picturesque," AA Files 20 (Autumn 1990):48. In the
camera, through the distance it creates between object
catalogue for the MoMA exhibition Mies in Berlin, Claire Zimmerman
restates the now commonplace assertion that the Barcelona Pavilion
and subject, opens up an optical sub-conscious akin to
was highly site specific. Restating Tegethoff's earlier argument, the effects of the interpretation of dreams and
Zimmerman explains: "Mies himself selected the site for the pavilion . psychoanalysis; it helps one to discover hidden
. ., a critical decision for this contextual, site-dependent building. The meanings and structures that otherwise would have gone
German Pavilion established a gateway between the grandiose,
unnoticed. This quality of distance and abstraction,
eclectic architecture of the Exposition proper and the picturesque
"Spanish village," the Pueblo Espa?ol, on the hill behind the German
site." Claire Zimmerman, "German Pavilion, International Exposition,
Barcelona, 1928-29," Mies in Berlin, ed. Terrance Riley and Barry 31. Walter Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
Bergdoll (New York: MoMA, 2001), p. 236. in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 236.

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 178 RES 39 SPRING 2001
intrinsic to photography, has shaped a number of
interpretations of the pavilion. Among the most often
cited of these studies is Robin Evans's "Mies van der
Rohe's Paradoxical Symmetries," in which he maintains
that there was, hidden within the pavilion, a horizontal
axis of symmetry.
Notice the difficulty of distinguishing the travertine floor,
which reflects the light, from the plaster ceiling, which
receives it. If the floor and the ceiling had been of the same
material, the difference in brightness would have been
greater. Here, Mies used material asymmetry to create
optical symmetry, rebounding the natural light in order to
make the ceiling more sky-like and the ambiance more
expansive.32
Yet, by his own account, the pavilion's "horizontal plane
of symmetry," was not apparent to Evans during his visit
to the reconstructed building, becoming visible only later
through studying his own photographs. "Perusing the
slides I had taken of the reconstructed pavilion, I found it
difficult to decide which way up they went?an artefact
of photography, no doubt." Evans continues, "Then I
changed my mind. It was not an artefact of photography,
but a property of the pavilion itself, a property of which I
had not been conscious while there [but which] the
photographs had made it easier to discern."33
To verify this discovery which was not, "an artefact of
photography," but nonetheless, was made "easier to
discern" through photography, Evans reviewed "as many
photographs as [he] could find of both the original and
the reconstructed pavilion."34 Included in his survey
would have been the much published Bild-Bericht
photograph MMA 1180?the same photograph that
Tegethoff uses to illustrate the blurred boundary between
the perimeter wall and the background vegetation.35
Neither writer mentions, however, that this print, like a
number of other Bild-Bericht master prints, has been
painted over?probably prior to its first publication?
suggesting a different intention from the one Evans
attributes to the pavilion.36 The ceiling of the overhang
32. Robin Evans, "Mies van der Rohe's Paradoxical Symmetries,"
A4 Files 19 (Spring 1990):63-64.
33. Ibid., p. 63.
34. Ibid., p. 66.
35. Evans illustrates his article with his own photograph in which
he recreates the framed view of MMA 1180. Ibid., fig. 18.
36. There are two "original" {MMA 1180) prints in the MoMA
archive. One of the prints is cropped and painted, the other seems not
to have been re-touched. It is the re-touched print that was reproduced
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(the figure of which symmetrically corresponds to the
figure of the travertine floor below) has been airbrushed
with light-gray paint, concealing what, in an
"untouched" version of the same master print, appears
to be a mottled plaster surface. It is the painted version
that appears in, for example, Johnson's canonical MoMA
monograph of Mies.37 Whether or not Mies altered the
print with his own hand is unclear, but considering the
importance of these photographs as the primary visual
documents of his most publicized building to date, it is
hard to imagine that he did not have a hand in the
alterations. By covering-up its roughness, the ceiling
appears less, not more, like the highly textured travertine
floor, suggesting that the architect wanted the
photographs to highlight the difference between the two
horizontal planes, not their similarity. Rather than
wanting to create a horizontal symmetry that requires
the optical equivalence of top and bottom, it seems
more likely that Mies wanted to create a sense of
horizon. This requires not only bifurcation, but also a
sense of difference, which is exactly what one finds in
the painted version of the print.38
Although the optical equivalence that Evans describes
is apparent in one of his own carefully framed
photographs of the free-standing onyx dor?e wall and in
Mies's single surviving perspective drawing of the interior,
throughout Mies's career. Additional changes to this print include the
hand-painting of the far column, highlighting the reflectivity and depth
of its chromed surface, making it appear, as Robin Evans describes, a
"smears of light." Ibid., p. 58. While the columns do appear as bright
vertical lines of light in virtually every Berliner Bild-Bericht
photograph. The columns in the reconstruction are stainless steel,
which although reflective, have a more matte appearance than the
original chrome finished steel, leading one to question whether or not
this is another instance of projecting an observation made from the
1929 photographs onto his first-hand experience of the reconstruction.
Two other Berliner Bild-Bericht master prints in the MoMA archive
have been airbrushed with light gray paint, in one case masking-out an
ornate tower that looms in the background of one of the exterior views
taken from the podium. They are MMA 1437 and Seidman 248.
37. Philip Johnson (see note 11), p. 70. It also appears on the cover
of the monograph.
38. The idea of "horizon" in Mies's work, particularly in the
pavilion, has been the subject of a number of recent interpretations
including the Evans and Constant articles already cited. Also see Dan
Hoffman, "The Receding Horizon of Mies?Work of the Cranbrook
Architecture Studio," The Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Mertins
(Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 98-117. Based in
part on Evan's work and offered in contrast to Hoffman's conclusions
see, Randall Ott, "The Horizontal Symmetry of Mies van der Rohe,"
Dimensions 6 (1993):112-131.

it is difficult to find any trace of it in the other Bild-Bericht
master prints.39 Nor was the equivalence of top and
bottom apparent to the first-hand observer of 1929, for
whom the heavily mottled surface of the "honey colored"
travertine floor contrasted vividly with the bright white
plaster ceiling?a difference that would have been
enhanced by one's movement through the interior.40
Evans's and Tegethoff's claims, on the other hand, are
dependent on an absence of movement?on limiting
one's vision to the kind of framed, static views of an
abstract visual field particular to the photographic image.
The design of architecture depends upon the delicate
and subtle manipulation of myriad elements; the
construction of building, in contrast, is often an unsubtle
affair. This is particularly true of temporary exhibition
buildings. Owing to extreme limitations of time and
budget Mies settled for many half-measures to complete
the pavilion, albeit a few weeks after the exhibition
opened. Among these were exterior walls crudely
covered with painted rough stucco, a plinth that barely
turns the northern corner of the building before it
abruptly stops, an unevenly finished plaster ceiling,
periodic flooding of the interior, a curtain track that
rarely worked for a curtain Mies probably never
wanted.41 Conversely, the varied interpretations of the
pavilion converge on Mies's use of precious materials
and construction techniques that were built to last,
further distinguishing it from other modern exhibition
buildings of the period.42 Yet Ignasi de Sol?-Morales, the
39. Nor is it confirmed by the experiences of visitors to the
reconstruction. Another unintentional photographic influence on
Evans's discovery of horizontal symmetry may have come from the
pamphlet that accompanied an exhibition commemorating the fiftieth
anniversary of the pavilion at the National Gallery of Art. In the
collections of both the Mies van der Rohe Archive and the MoMA
Library, the pamphlet includes a square formatted reprint of the
Berliner Bild-Bericht MMA 1180 in which both the onyx wall and the
Kolbe figure are bifurcated by the stapled gutter. See Mies van der
Rohe: The Barcelona Pavilion 50th Anniversary (see note 13).
40. See Helen Appleton Read, "Germany at the Barcelona World's
Fair, Arts (October 1929):112-113.
41. Correspondence from 1929 in the MoMA archives reports
difficulties with "the running of the curtain on its rails," indicating that
there was, at some point, a curtain hanging in the pavilion along the
front window-wall. Sol?-Morales (see note 4), p. 20.
42. Speaking of the furniture Mies designed for the Barcelona
Pavilion, Peter Blake observed, "like everything else Mies did at
Barcelona, these pieces were . . . made to last through the ages, both
in terms of solidity and in terms of design." Blake (see note 7), p. 55.
The pavilion's inability to withstand the exigencies of climate
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Dodds: Body in pieces 1 79
author of the reconstructed pavilion, laments that the
combination of inadequate site work, an inexpensively
constructed roof, and material finishes that would have
quickly eroded in the Mediterranean climate all marked
this building for a short life span from its inception.43
The Barcelona Pavilion that Evans and Tegethoff
theorize, however, is an edited version, unified and
valorized by carefully framed and cropped
monochromatic photographs wherein unsubtle building
construction is imbued with the nuance of the
architect's hand.
Evans and Tegethoff use of the distancing device of
photography like a Claude Glass. In the eighteenth
century, Thomas Gray proposed using the Claude Glass
as standard equipment for encountering a landscape
picturesquely.44 Named after Claude Lorrain, the glasses
were small, hand held portable devices typically made
of reflective tinted glass. The picturesque traveler
transformed the quotidian into something strange and
different by turning away from the physical landscape
notwithstanding, the table Mies designed for the Barcelona Pavilion
was never reproduced by Knoll because it was structurally unsound.
While installed in the pavilion, it was propped-up against the adjacent
onyx wall.
43. Sol?-Morales explains, "The reconstruction was . . . undertaken
not in order the [sic] raise anew a building following exactly the same
technical conditions of the 1929 Pavilion, but with a view to
guaranteeing its permanence" (see note 4), p. 29. A number of
material and design changes were made in the reconstruction to make
the new building look more like the vintage photographs while still
others were made necessary to translate a temporary type of
construction into a permanent one. Among these are: (1) the chrome
plated columns changed to a stainless steel (due to climate), (2) a
harder travertine substituted for the soft, honey-colored Roman
travertine chosen by Mies, (3) the addition of artificial lighting, (4)
permanently mounted exterior doors, (5) a new roof construction and
drainage system, (6) a poured concrete foundation system to substitute
for the traditional Catalan vaulted brick system, (7) modifications to
the rough stucco on the backsides of the original end walls that was
painted green to approximate the color of the marble due to financial
and time constraints during the original construction. Besides these
intentional changes, other material differences include the hue of the
tinted glass and the Alpine marble perimeter wall which Appleton
Read described as "olive colored" but in the reconstruction appears
distinctly blue-green. See Sol?-Morales (see note 4), pp. 20, 29-33.
But then, she also described the floor as being made of onyx. Appleton
Read, Ibid., p. 113.
44. See Thomas Gray, The Works of Thomas Gray, ed. Edmund
Grosse (London, 1884), vol. I, pp. 250, 260. Cited in John Dixon
Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of
Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), fn. 14,
p. 359.
 180 RES 39 SPRING 2001
and looking instead at its reflection in the mirrored
glass. Through reorienting oneself to the landscape-as
reflection, the actual landscape was de-familiarized,
rendering it closer to a painted image of a landscape.45
In Glass in Architecture and Decoration, Raymond
McGrath directly invokes both the Claude Glass and the
Picturesque in his description of the "stereoscopic"
effects of the Barcelona Pavilion's mirror-like surfaces.46
Commenting on that same painted Bild-Bericht
photograph (MMA 1180), McGrath, an early
proselytizer of European modernism and one of the first
architects to realize modern buildings and interiors in
the United Kingdom, explains:
Grey or black polished glass is the modern counterpart, on
a larger scale, of the 'Claude Lorrain glasses' in which the
elegiac Gray observed his eighteenth-century landscapes.
These Claude glasses were little convex mirrors, about 4 in.
In diameter and backed with black foil. As Christopher
Hussey remarks in The Picturesque, 'The slight convexity of
the glass gathers every scene reflected in it into a tiny
45. The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky analyzed the
"literariness" of art and literature, including modern and avant-garde
works. See Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (1929), trans. Benjamin
Sher (Elmwood Park, III.: Dal key Archive Press, 1990), p. 102. Working
through Saussure's idea of language as a "system of differences,"
Shklovsky developed his own concept of "defamiliarization." See
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1967-1974),
trans. Roy Harris (La Salle: Open Court Classics, 1986). Francis
Frascina explains, "Shklovsky argued that a novel way of saying
surprises us into a new way of seeing; a novel medium (rather than the
message) enables us to realize what is familiar, habitual and expected
in a given context." See Francis Frascina, "Realism and Ideology: An
Introduction to Semiotics and Cubism," in Primitivism, Cubism,
Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993), p. 100.
46. Having never visited the Barcelona Pavilion, McGrath's
observations were limited to the Bild-Bericht prints and the first-hand
accounts of others. The problem of the distorting effects of second
hand accounts, such as McGrath's, in the literature on the Barcelona
Pavilion, is central to Juan Pablo Bonta's research project. Bonta
specifically criticizes McGrath for inadvertently distorting Rubio i
Tudur?'s observation that the Barcelona Pavilion was "metaphysical"
into another meaning not intended by Rubio i Tudur?. Bonta quotes
McGrath, "To enclose, limit and extend space is a metaphysical as
well as a physical problem." Cited in Bonta (see note 8), p. 71. Bonta
concludes, "For Rubio i Tudur?, 'metaphysical' meant useless, without
practical purpose, superfluous. Somehow along the road, McGrath
mixed up the terms and he used it for 'geometric.'" Ibid. McGrath's
observation, however, was not about the pavilion, but rather was a
commentary on the new possibilities of modern plate glass and how
its reflective effects can contribute to the defining of a particularly
modern quality of space. See McGrath (see note 28), p. 30.
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picture, and, by reducing the colours into a lower ratio,
accentuates the tonal values/ A similar accentuation takes
place in the black polished glass, giving an almost
stereoscopic effect. Here Mies van der Rohe has used a
wall of black polished glass to reflect the pool, the statue
and the foliage of the garden. 47
Where McGrath finds in the photographs of the
pavilion's reflective surfaces isolated views of a distant
nature, Caroline Constant contends that this quality of
isolation which is, "nascent in the Picturesque," was
fundamental to the direct physical experience of the
Barcelona Pavilion.48 "While immersed in the
experience of Mies's pavilion, the spectator is
simultaneously distanced from it." Constant continues:
The assertion of aesthetic distance was a primary
accomplishment of the Picturesque?an effect simulated by
the Claude Glass.... For Mies, as for the Picturesque
landscape designer, the lack of resolution inherent in such
contradictions was the starting-point for the ongoing
process of interpretation.49
Is it possible therefore, to read in Tegethoff's and Evans's
conflation of photograph and building, and McGrath's
and Constant's metaphor of the Claude Glass, a desire
for the kind of aestheticizing distance inherent in
photography that, like the Claude Glass, frames views
which are imaginary of settings that are real? 50
47. Raymond McGrath and A. C. Frost, Glass in Architecture and
Decoration (London: The Architectural Press, 1937), p. 370.
48. Caroline Constant, "The Barcelona Pavilion as Landscape
Garden: Modernity and the Picturesque," AA Files 20 (Autumn
1990):46.
49. Ibid.
50. Susan Sontag observes, "Aesthetic distance seems built into the
very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly
with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs,
even the most amateurish, at the level of art." Susan Sontag, "In Plato's
Cave," in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p.
21. The conflict between appearance and fact is an important
undercurrent to much of the literature on the Barcelona Pavilion.
Contributing to this are the many factual discrepancies in the
published accounts of the pavilion that Mies knew about but chose
not to correct. Walther Genzmer's articles of 1929 are the sources of
two of the most enduring of these. Genzmer reported (and since then
it has been universally reported) that Tinian marble was used in the
perimeter wall. The source of this misattribution originates in the first
of Genzmer's two articles in Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung {already
cited, see note 12 ) and not, as Sol?-Morales cites, in the October issue of
Die Baugilde. Elsewhere, Genzmer observes, the "calm unbroken surface"
of the adjoining wall of the King Alfonso XIII Pavilion was a perfect foil to
the long low pavilion of Mies, leading a number of recent writers to

Documentation and depiction
The reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion has
created a rift of sorts in the nature of our understanding
of this icon, inverting its long-standing relationship to its
photographic image. This rift is sensed no less in the
published color photographs of the reconstruction as it is
by visiting the new building. Highlighting this shift, in a
number of recent monographs on Mies van der Rohe
one encounters, with some alarm, Bild-Bericht prints
interspersed with color photographs of the
reconstruction, all designated as the 1929 building.51
Commenting on the Barcelona Pavilion's inverted
relation to physical reality, Jean-Louis Cohen observes:
Completed in 1986, the scrupulous reconstruction of the
pavilion adds a new dimension to the perception of the
building, as it had circulated in the history of architecture.
The recovered color appears somewhat forced, so much
had the image in black and white photographic
reproductions affected the aura of authenticity, inverting in
some manner the remarks of Walter Benjamin in "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
Nevertheless, the possibility recovered by moving through
the three-dimensional space pales the two-dimensional
reproductions.52
While Walter Benjamin argued that the mechanical
reproduction of photography effectively cut-off the work
of art from the world of tradition, in the case of the Bild
Bericht prints we seem to have a reversal of this
argument. Mechanical reproduction, for Benjamin,
emancipated "the work of art from its parasitical
dependence on ritual."53 "From a photographic
conclude that the pavilion was conceived of as a site specific project. Yet,
the ochre colored stucco wall of the King Alfonso pavilion was (and still is)
decorated with Baroque serpentine pilasters and festoons in base relief.
The incised decoration, evident in photographs of the reconstruction, is
either out-of-frame or lost in an homogenous tone of gray in the Bild
Bericht photographs, suggesting that like Evans, when Genzmer wrote of
an "unbroken surface" it was the Bild-Bericht photographs to which he
was referring, not the building. See Genzmer (see note 12), "Der Deutche
Reichspavillon." Translation in Tegethoff (see note 14), p. 86.
51. Two recent examples of this are monographs by Werner Blaser
and Jean-Louis Cohen. Unlike Cohen, Blaser does not comment on the
relationship between vintage and recent photographs. See Werner
Blaser, Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure (New York: Watson
Guptill, 1994), p. 35. Also see Jean-Louis Cohen, Mies van der Rohe
(Paris: Hazan, 1994).
52. Cohen (see note 51), p. 52. Translation by author. For English
translation see, Jean-Louis Cohen, Mies van der Rohe (London: Spon, 1996).
53. Walter Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 221.
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Dodds: Body in pieces 1 81
negative," he explained, "one can make any number of
prints; to ask for the 'authentic print' makes no sense."54
In the case of the Barcelona Pavilion, however, there is
no original negative. Moreover, all reproductions are
tied to the same group of "original" prints, many of
which carry the mark of the hand through painting or
cutting. Consequently, this earlier idea of authenticity
seems to reenter the discourse, if only slightly. The
problem of authenticity in the case of the Barcelona
Pavilion goes beyond the question of color and the
alteration of the master prints. Unable to locate accurate
drawings of the "as-built" 1929 pavilion, Sol?-Morales
was compelled, in many instances, to base his
reconstruction on the "physical evidence" documented
in the Bild-Bericht photographs, leading him to observe:
This building ... is an icon which has for more than fifty
years emanated an intense energy?if only from the pages
of books and reviews. In this sense the reconstruction ... is
a traumatic operation. [I]t presupposes sharing a
perspective dear to Duchamp . . . [figs. 9a-9b].55
Sol?-Morales continues:
It is difficult to maintain the almost religious conviction that art
is... unrepeatable and transcendent when its reproducibility
invades all the channels of diffusion .... If, however, we try to
concretely regain?and with the tridimensionality of its
spaces?what until today has fundamentally remained an
iconographie reference point, then we propose ourselves with
an . . . imprudent act. . . . Not because the quality of the
realization is inferior... but rather for the fact that every copy
is nothing but a reinterpretation.56
Just as Sol?-Morales came to depend upon
photographs of the 1929 building for the design of the
reconstruction, personal correspondence between Mies
and Lilly Reich in the MoMA archive suggests that Mies
also depended upon the Bild-Bericht prints, placing
more value on them than the building itself. By the time
of the official opening of the German Pavilion in May,
1929, Mies was already absorbed in the design of the
Tugendhat house in Brno. And although the
correspondence between Mies and Reich reveals that
the pavilion had numerous problems requiring
resolution, Mies was inattentive to them and quickly lost
interest in the temporary building.57 Moreover, when
54. Ibid., p. 224.
55. Ignazi de Sol?-Morales, "Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Barcelona
1929-1986," Domus674 (1986):77-79.
56. Ibid., pp. 79-80.
57. Sol?-Morales (see note 4), p. 20.
182 RES 39 SPRING 2001
Figure 9a. View north from the office of the new Barcelona
Pavilion (1981-1986) by Sol?-Morales et. al. Photograph
courtesy of Christina Betanzos Pint (2000).
given an opportunity to save the building from
demolition, Mies declined to intervene. Apparently a
local entrepreneur from Barcelona expressed a serious
interest in converting the pavilion into a restaurant.58
One suspects, however, that in Mies's eyes, the
prolonged existence of the pavilion, particularly if it
were re-programmed with such a prosaic function,
would have diminished much of what the Bild-Bericht
photographs had achieved. Mies was plainly aware of
how this building, built using materials and techniques
appropriate for temporary construction, would have
required substantial physical alterations to become the
monument that the Bild-Bericht photographs depicted.
After all, the Berliner Bild-Bericht photographs had been
published throughout Europe and the United States;
Mies had what he wanted. Given the choice of
preserving the Bild-Bericht master prints (which he
brought with him to the United States) or the building,
Mies chose the photographs.
Perhaps one of the most unexpected outcomes of
examining the photographic status of the Barcelona
Pavilion is how it helps to reveal Mies's reliance on the
use of photography for both establishing and
maintaining himself as a central figure in early
58. Ibid., p. 21.
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Figure 9b. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig German Pavilion, Barcelona,
Spain, 1928-1929. Photograph courtesy of the Mies van der Rohe
Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. View north
from the office, 1929 (Seidman 248) Berliner Bild-Bericht.
twentieth-century European modernism.59 As the
director of exhibitions for the November Gruppe and a
frequent contributor to such polemical magazines as G
and Fr?hlicht, Mies clearly understood the
propagandistic power of publishing unbuilt and
temporary exhibition projects.60
59. Mies's dependence on photography was, in part necessitated by
the conditions of his practice. Most of his early built works (1924-1936)
were either temporary installations or relatively inaccessible private
residences. Mies's specific views on photography are unclear. What is
known is that, rather than looking through the view finder with the
photographer as Le Corbusier was wont to do, Mies tended to control
the photography after-the-fact, through editing and altering the prints.
This way of operating was foreign to Ezra Stoller who, as the
photographer of the Seagrams Building, thought Mies "uninterested in
photography." Stoller recounts his first meeting with Mies to discuss the
photography of the building. The meeting was arranged by Phyllis
Lambert. "[W]e sat in uncomfortable silence with each other for several
minutes. When Phyllis returned ... [Mies] said, 'Mr. Stoller will take
many pictures and we will select a few." Quoted in William S. Saunders,
Modern Architecture : Photographs by Ezra Stoller (New York : Abrams,
1990), p. 82. Also see, Colomina (see note 21).
60. In 1928, just prior to beginning the design of the pavilion, Mies
wrote, "Only if the central problem of our time?the intensification of
life?becomes the content of the exhibition will they find meaning and
justification." Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, "On the Theme: Exhibitions,"
Die Form, 3, no. 4 (1928): 121, from, Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless
Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art, Mark Jarzombek, trans.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 304.

But Mies's dependence on photography is hardly a
new discovery?it has simply been forgotten.61 As early
as 1935 George Nelson observed:
Up to ten years ago [Mies] had built virtually nothing of his
own, and it was only in certain groups in Germany that his
influence was making itself felt. Today he occupies a position
which is unique?even in Germany?and he is almost as
well known as the more widely publicized Le Corbusier. 62
Nelson continues:
In 1921 and the years immediately following [Mies]
published a brilliant series of studies: the Glass Skyscraper,
which proved nothing; a cantilevered office building
consisting of alternate horizontal bands of window and
spandrel, a scheme used by Mendelssohn with great effect
on Columbus Haus in Berlin; and several country house
projects. None of these, it will be noted, were ever built;
but they were published far and wide, and by means of the
printing press Mies entered upon the road to fame. 63
In his review of Philip Johnson's MoMA monograph
from the 1947 exhibition, Joseph Rykwert similarly
voiced alarm about mythological status of Mies's
reputation which, by the late 1940's, was already
identified with the photographic medium through which
most of his work was known.64
The figure of Mies van der Rohe was been growing into a
myth for some years now. Representing the only crystallized
architectonic experiment which is both contemporary and a
serious rival to that of Le Corbusier, the Weissenhof
Siedlung at Stuttgart (1927), the German pavilion at the
Barcelona Exhibition (1929), the Tugendhat House at Brno
(1930), were known, if only through the medium of
fragmentary photographs, to most students of contemporary
architecture; almost entirely on the basis of these buildings,
61. Colomina does not discuss Mies's work in Privacy and
Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Ibid. Yet, in a paper
presented at a symposium in 1992, while she was still writing Privacy
and Publicity, she recognized that "Mies became known almost
exclusively though photography and the printed media." Unfortunately
she does not explore the history of this observation, focusing instead
on the suit and top hat Mies's wore to the opening ceremony.
Colomina (see note 21), p. 213.
62. George Nelson, "Architects of Europe Today: 7?Van Der Rohe,
Germany," Penc/7 Points (September 1935):453.
63. Ibid., p. 454. [emphasis added]
64. Johnson (see note 11). Published in concert with the Museum
of Modern Art's 1947 exhibition of the architect's work, the
monograph helped firmly establish the prominence of Mies in the
post-war American architectural scene.
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Dodds: Body in pieces 1 83
van der Rohe's reputation rose as high as that of Gropius, or
even or Le Corbusier.65
Skeptical of whether the photographic reproductions of
Mies's work directly corresponds to the qualities of the
artifacts depicted in those images, Nelson's and
Rykwert's uneasiness is an index of the gap between
appearance and fact that persists in much of the
scholarship on Mies van der Rohe and is amplified in
the case of the Barcelona Pavilion. What photography
and its mechanical reproduction did for Mies's early
career, the Bild-Bericht photographs seem to have
accomplished for the pavilion; they do not illustrate the
architecture as much as they enable it.
Sky and mirror
The Barcelona Pavilion's apparently inverted relation
to physical reality has led Robin Evans to remark:
Buildings are not always better than pictures show them to
be, nor are they necessarily more significant than the
theories that spring up around them. In his study of its
critical history, Juan Pablo Bonta showed why the actual
pavilion came [in] a poor third against photographs of it
and writings about it.66
In two books and numerous articles and reviews, Juan
Rabio Bonta's work occupies a central position in the
Barcelona Pavilion literature.67 Bonta is less interested in
the semiotics of the photographs of the pavilion, however,
than he is in the pavilion's textual history. When Bonta
does cite the photographs, it is indirectly, in terms of what
(and when) others have said about them. While Tegethoff,
Evans and others have iconographically interpreted the
pavilion, Bonta has produced a semiological iconology o?
the building. "The central issue," Bonta explains, "is not
what forms mean, but rather how they mean the various
65. Joseph Rykwert, "Mies van der Rohe," Burlington Magazine 91
(1949):268. [Emphasis added.]
66. Evans (see note 32), p. 56.
67. Bonta's contribution to the literature on the Barcelona Pavilion
and Mies van der Rohe includes, Juan Pablo Bonta, Architecture and
Its Interpretation: A Study of Expressive Systems in Architecture (New
York: Rizzoli, 1979). Also see the smaller and earlier An Anatomy of
Architectural Interpretation: A Semiotic Review of the Criticism of Mies
van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (see note 8). For a critical summary
of both texts see Richard Wesley's review, Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 40, no. 1 (March 1981):83-84. For a review of
recent literature on Mies, see Juan Pablo Bonta's, "Mies as Text,"
Design Book Review 13 (Fall 1987):20-25.
184 RES 39 SPRING 2001

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Figure 10. 1964 Blaser Plan with inaccurate roof, and podium. Courtesy of
Werner Blaser, Basel, Switzerland.

things they do."68 In his analysis of the Barcelona
Pavilion's publication history, Bonta describes what can
happen to iconographers who stray too far from the
"graphic documents" of the pavilion. Basing one's
appraisal, "on other texts," rather than primary sources,
Bonta cautioned, results in the creation of "verbal
traditions"?an apparent evenf horizon beyond which the
"building may be completely lost."69
During the last decade, most iconographers of the
pavilion have either ignored Bonta's cautions or have Rosalind Krauss observes,
approached his work with disdain.70 Manfredo Tafuri for
example comments that, "despite the impressive
bibliography compiled, [Bonta] does not seem [to
capture] the significance of Mies's work."71 Jos?
Quetglas, referring to the same 1975 essay observes
with contempt that Bonta illustrates his text with a
drawing where:
the roof is seen to pass over the statue and covers the
whole pool, resting on the perimeter wall. For this utter
indifference toward the object that is the object of his
critique, Bonta deserves to be placed at the very tail end, in
all of its meanings, of the line of those who have
commented on the pavilion [fig. 10]. 72
Coming full circle on Bonta's cautionary tale,
As I was reading some of the recent literature on Mies van
der Rohe, I encountered a phenomenon I had not known
until then: I came across the politically correct Mies, the
poststructural ist Mies, almost, we could say, the
postmodernist Mies/'73

68. Bonta (see note 8), p. 77. Later, Bonta observes, "An anthology
of texts about Barcelona can teach us more about changes in
architectural ?deals over the last thirty-five years than a series of
exhibition buildings designed during the same period." Ibid., p. 78.
69. Ibid., p. 71.
70. See, for example, Richard Padovan's, "Mies van der Rohe
Reinterpreted," UIA International Architect Magazine 3 (1983):39-42.
Although Padovan summarizes the literature on Mies using Bonta's
terminology, he fails to mention or cite Bonta.
71. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes
and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1987), pp. 327-328, n. 51.
72. Quetglas (see note 16), p. 139. The floor plan Quetglas correctly
criticizes was prepared by Werner Blaser in Mies's Chicago office in
1964, inexplicably with Mies's approval. See Blaser (see note 51), pp.
28-29. First published in 1965 (New York: Praeger). In addition to the
problem of the Blaser plan that Bonta used (and Blaser used again in
the 1994 reprinting of his book) Bonta also uses an axonometric of the
building that is not only inaccurate, but is a drawing type that is
antithetical to the graphic philosophy of Mies and the pavilion.
73. Rosalind Krauss, "The Grid, the/Cloud/, and the Detail," The
Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Mertins (Princeton: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1994), p. 133.

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"[T]he revisionary readings of Mies that I encountered,"
Krauss argues, ". . . were being put to work to create an
anti-formalist, anti-classical Mies. . . ."74 Krauss quotes
Hays, who is quoted by Evans, who also quotes
Quetglas, who in turn is commented on by Hays, to
demonstrate the dizzying swirl of often circular "verbal
traditions" about which Bonta cautioned, on this, the
most evanescent of Mies's projects. Krauss cites Hays:
[Mies] insists that an order is immanent [only] in the surfaces
itself and that the order is continuous with and dependent
upon the world in which the viewer actually moves. This
sense of surface and volume, severed from the knowledge of
an internal order or a unifying logic, is enough to wrench the
building from the atemporal, idealized realm of autonomous
form and install it in a specific situation in the real world of
experienced time, open to the chance and uncertainty of life
in the metropolis.75
Krauss concludes:
Indeed, in one description after another of the Barcelona
Pavilion (by Robin Evans and Jos? Quetglas, for example)
the emphasis had shifted entirely away from the kind of
contrapuntal but nevertheless classical logic of plan and
elevation to which I had been introduced back when Mies
was seen as the very epitome of the International Style,
and instead what I was now being shown was a structure
committed to illusionism, with every material assuming,
chameleon-like, the attributes of something not itself?
columns dissolving into bars of light, or glass walls
becoming opaque and marble ones appearing transparent
due to their reflectivity?but even more importantly, with
a mysteriousness built into the plan such that the building
is constructed without an approachable or knowable
center and is in fact experienced as (to use these authors'
word) a labyrinth.76
Limited as we are to vintage photographs and
previous interpretations, any reading of the pavilion, this
one included, is largely determined by how one frames
one's view. Recognizing this representational paradox,
Krauss invokes the memory of Fillipo Brunelleschi's
demonstration of perspective wherein he similarly used
a mirror and a camera-like device to represent an
74. Ibid., p. 134.
75. K. Michael Hays, "Critical Architecture: Between Culture and
Form," Perspecta 21 (1984): 20. Quoted in Krauss (see note 73), p. 134.
76. Ibid. For the source of Hays's "labyrinth" metaphor as well as
the "montage" analogy see Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co,
Modern Architecture, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Abrams,
1979), p. 155.
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Dodds: Body in pieces 1 85
architecture. Rather than filling-in the zone above the
painted image of the baptistery with a representation of
the sky, Brunelleschi covered the area with silver leaf,
"so that, acting as a mirror, it would capture the
reflections of the real sky passing over the head of the
viewer staring into the optical box of the perspective
construction."77 Rethinking the Barcelona Pavilion in
terms of Brunelleschi's mirror, it may be more valuable
to think of the pavilion as being assigned not only to
the zone of architecture, but the zone of the silver leaf
as well. Understanding that the pavilion is both "sky"
and "mirror"?both the object and the surface of
reflection?may explicate the nature of the collective
desire that is fixated on but never fulfilled by the
photographs of this building.78
Desire and dreams
The Catalan landscape architect Rubio i Tudur?
noticed that the quality of space he experienced while
walking through the pavilion was augmented by the
reflections of "objects and people, in such a manner that
what you see when you look through the glass is
confused with that which you see reflected there."79
Manfredo Tafuri was the first of the pavilion's more
recent interpreters to recognize the importance of Rubio
i Tudur?'s account?claiming that the condition of
fragmentation and disorientation were inherent in the
building's mirrored surfaces, labyrinthine path and its
apparent lack of an exit.80 Tafuri's metaphor of the
fragment and Rubio i Tudur?'s description of the
77. Krauss (see note 73), p. 141.
78. This conflation of the object of reflection and the image of
reflection is similar to Lacan's metaphor of the "mirror stage" which is
not limited to the association of a figurai image with one's own body,
but extends to include the identification of the sensation of movement
with the reflection of one's body. Jacques Lacan, ?crits: A Selection,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 4.
79. Rubio i Tudur? (see note 6), p. 409. Rubio i Tudur? collaborated
with Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier (c. 1923) on the design for the
grounds of the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. See
Doroth?e Imbert, The Modernist Garden in France (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993), p. 23. Rubio i Tudur? also exhibited his own
urban design scheme for the city of Barcelona at the exposition. See
Nicolau M. Rubio i Tudur? (1891-1981): El Jardi Obra d'Art
(Barcelona: Fundado Caixa de Pensions, 1985), p. 39.
80. This sense of disorientation described by Tafuri is amplified by
the building's ambiguity of enclosure and a lack of an orienting
shadow on the interior. See Tafuri (see note 71 ), pp. 111-112.
186 RES 39 SPRING 2001

MASSIVE WALL
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Figure 11. Plan of OMA Pavilion Installation 1986 Milan Triennale XVII. Courtesy of Rem Koolhaas, Office
for Metropolitan Architecture, Herr Bokelweg 149, 3032 Rotterdam, Netherlands.

pavilion's reflective surfaces are two of the unifying
themes of recent commentaries. Caroline Constant
combines the two, analogizing the pavilion to the use of
the Claude Glass in Picturesque landscapes:
The Pavilion is a montage of independent systems ... all
colliding visually in the polished, reflective surfaces. The
precision of the materials contrasts with their perceptual
instability. Unlike the type of optical devices popular in the
eighteenth century, which provided an illusion of control
over nature, the reflective surfaces of Mies's Pavilion
simulate the temporal flux of nature.81
The spatial ambiguity found in some of the Berliner Bild
Bericht photographs notwithstanding, it is contradicted
by Lilly Reich's and Mies's unified conception for all of
the German exhibitions at the 1929 Exposition. Each
was part of a unified whole wherein all of the parts
succumbed to a single and relentless aesthetic program.82
For Linda Nochlin, the inherent contradiction
between fragment and whole is one of the fundamental
themes of modernity.
[I]t is by no means possible to assert that modernity may
only be associated with, or suggested by, a metaphoric or
actual fragmentation. On the contrary, paradoxically, or
dialectically, modern artists have moved toward its
opposite, with a will to totalization embodied in the notion
of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the struggle to overcome the
disintegrative effects?social, psychic, political?inscribed
in modern, particularly modern urban, experience, by
hypostatizing them within a higher unity. One might, from
this point of view, maintain that modernity is indeed
marked by the will toward totalization as much as it is
metaphorized by the fragment. 83
The conjunction of a totalizing vision and the
metaphorized fragment, so basic to the general structure

81. Constant (see note 48), p. 48. Also see Hays (see note 75), p.
18. For a discussion of the relationship of the modern city to the
quality of fragmentation, see David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity:
Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), pp. 38-108.
82. The idea of a totalizing vision pervaded the collaborative
exposition work of Lilly Reich and Mies demonstrated in the 25
exhibitions Reich was responsible for at the Barcelona Exposition.
83. Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a
Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 53.

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 Dodds: Body in pieces 187

of modernity, pervades the iconographie history of the

pavilion. Many of the interpretations of the pavilion are
often unconscious attempts to bridge this gap between
wholly fragmented or completely whole?a bridge built
upon the mythic structure of mutually exclusive
propositions united by the plasticity of the Bild-Bericht
photographs.84 Recognizing that contradiction is inherent
to the nature of the pavilion permits Constant to argue that
the Barcelona Pavilion is at once a "cabinet of curiosities,"
and a work that "revealed the possibility to transcend
the decorative and sentimental limits of the modern
garden and to recover its intrinsic value, without resort
to mimesis, by reinstating its architectural essence."85
Nochlin contends that modernity is fundamentally
marked by the incessant negotiation between fragment
and whole. Gianni Vattimo, in contrast, maintains that
within the project of modernity, "aesthetic experience
appears to be an experience of estrangement, which
then requires recomposition and readjustment."86
Recognizing both the need for recovery and the
impossibility of replication, Rem Koolhaas and OMA
built their own interpretation of the Barcelona Pavilion Figure 12. Detail view of the entrance to the OMA Barcelona
at the 1985 Milan Triennale. The OMA version of the Pavilion Installation at 1986 Milan Triennale XVII. Courtesy of
Barcelona Pavilion, similar to their entry in the Strada Rem Koolhaas, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Herr
Nuova at the 1980 Venice Biennale, was constructed in Bokelweg 149, 3032 Rotterdam, Netherlands.
response to the then fashionable practice of installing
temporary classicized pavilions in major international
exhibitions. Inspired by Salvador Dali's "Paranoiac
the Spanish. . . . Meanwhile, the political situation in Spain
Critical Activity," OMA programmed their "Barcelona became tense and ... [flor a few days it was the
Pavilion" as a synaesthetic experience. The OMA headquarters of the Anarchists, but they quarreled about the
pavilion reproduced the plan of the original, warped to use of the spaces [see fig. 13]87
fit its crescent-shaped site inside Milan's Palazzo della
This fictive narrative describes how the dismantled
Triennale (figs. 11-12). An assortment of sounds, odors,
laser and spot lights, mirror reflections and projected pavilion arrived back in Germany just after Mies had left
images bombarded visitors, all coordinated to re for Chicago. Parts of the pavilion were, as the OMA
construct the telling of the Barcelona Pavilion myth. story goes, used in the construction of a ministry during
Over the loud speakers, a narrator provided the script. the war. Following the "Liberation" the ministry was
dismantled and pieces were used for the locker rooms of
The Crowds had gone. The king and queen had signed the the never-to-be realized 1952 Olympic Games in East
book. The pools were emptied. . . . Since Germany was in
Germany. They remained hidden until:
confusion, it was decided to leave the pavilion as a gift to
a scientist from the West, investigating the rebirth of
classicism in Eastern Europe, saw a fragment that seemed
84. Bruno Zevi and Caroline Constant provide two exceptions. vaguely familiar. . . . Negotiations were initiated . . . [and]
Zevi reads the pavilion as oscillating between Classicism and
Neoplasticism. See Bruno Zevi, Po?tica dell'architettura neopl?stica
(1953). Cited in Radovan (see note 70), p. 39. Also see Constant (see 87. Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Antwerpen: Kunstcentrum
note 48), p. 46. deSingel, 1988): 8 (An exhibition catalogue). Alex Wall of OMA
85. Constant (see note 48), pp. 52, 53. provided the voice. Also see Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, SMLXL,
86. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Baltimore: The Johns (New York, Monacelli Press, 1995), pp. 46-63.
Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 51.

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188 RES 39 SPRING 2001

J.funnlf.^ih.l'S

Figure 13. Story board of the apocryphal life of the pavilion from the OMA Pavilion Installation at 1986 Milan Triennale XVII.
Courtesy of Rem Koolhaas, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Herr Bokelweg 149, 3032 Rotterdam, Netherlands.

the fragments were exported in return for one medium-sized
computer and the secret design of a new machine gun.88
The OMA reconstruction demonstrates that the
photographic history of the Barcelona Pavilion is not
static. The Bild-Bericht photographs and the stories that
have grown up around them oscillate between
documentation and depiction?still implicated in
architectural production. They are "incitements to
reverie," destabilizing the normative limits of an
architectural experience.89 As Kracauer explains, "In
order for history to present itself, the mere surface
appearance of an object is its meaning." But how does
one destroy a surface?a dream?"buried under a layer
of snow." As the interpretations of Constant, Evans,
Koolhaas, Krauss, Sola-Morales, and Tegethoff suggest,
the dream that is the Barcelona Pavilion has become so
familiar to the community of writers and architects who
ponder it that it is often confused with waking
experiences. Sigmund Freud could have been describing
the history of these interpretations when he observed:
[l]n every sense a dream has its origin in the past. The
ancient belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed

coherence offered by photography must be destroyed. entirely devoid of truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled
For in the artwork the meaning of the object takes on the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future,
which the dreamer accepts as his present, has been shaped
spatial appearance, whereas in photography the spatial
in the likeness of the past by the indestructible wish.90

88. Ibid., p. 9. 90. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) (New
89. Sontag (see note 50), p. 21. York: Gramercy Books, 1996), p. 428.

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 Dodds: Body in pieces 189

Figure 14. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, German Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain, 1928-1929.
Photograph courtesy of the Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
View from garden (western side) looking toward Kolbe statue (MMA 11254) Berliner Bild-Bericht.

As much the image of a building as it is the building of
an image, the Barcelona Pavilion leads us into the future
every time we accept the dream it represents as a part of
our present. That which keeps drawing us back to the
pavilion may be the indestructible wish for
"recomposition and readjustment" we find momentarily
fulfilled in those photo-fragments?where architectural
space and ineffable space seem no longer separated by
the space of our desire.
Failing to distinguish between action and the
provocation to action, between desire and the object of
desire has created less a history of the Barcelona Pavilion
than a chronicle of those who have interpreted the
photographic images through which it has become so
celebrated. The tale of the Barcelona Pavilion, like all
stories of origin, is an "anthropological dream . ..
existing beyond and above . . . use, above and beyond . .
. symbolic exchange." Its story tells us less about Mies's
oeuvre and the origins of modern architecture than about
the culture of the diffused image of which the Barcelona
Pavilion and modern architecture are but a part.91
For some the story of the pavilion is a cautionary
tale, wherein simulacrum and authentic artifacts are
conflated. For others the photographic images of the
pavilion represent a project that is not yet complete.
"[I]t can be . . . recovered only by memory of the trace
it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is
thereby to begin to write it; the address not being
written, it must establish its own writing."92 Every time
one apprehends the photographic images of the
pavilion represented in the Berliner Bild-Bericht prints
is to visit it for the first time.
91. Jean Baudrillard, 777e Ecstasy of Communication (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1988), p. 11.
92. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang,
1982), p. 36.

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190 RES 39 SPRING 2001
Figure 15. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, German Pavilion,
Barcelona, Spain, 1928-1929. Photograph courtesy of the
Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Detail of night view of light wall as seen from the rear
garden. (MMA 7360) Berliner Bild-Bericht
Rubio i Tudur? said of the pavilion that, "Mies van der
Rohe . . . has given to his representational monument,
the tranquil form of a house."93 If the Barcelona Pavilion
represents a house, it is a house the address of which
has yet to be written?filled with the spirits and dreams
93. Rubio i Tudur? (see note 6), p. 409.
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of those that have studied and desired it. It is the house
of those who believe with Habermas, "that instead of
giving up modernity and its project as a lost cause, we
should learn from the mistakes of those extravagant
programs which have tried to negate modernity."94 Like
the project of modernity, the body of the Barcelona
Pavilion is not missing; it is merely in pieces. It is
because of the intangibility of this body in pieces that
we continue desiring to occupy what we can only
inhabit, piece by piece, as in a dream. Through its
incitement to reverie and the ruse of the photographic
mirror, the Barcelona Pavilion continues to propel us
forward. The Berliner Bild-Bericht prints do not
document a building; they anticipate an architecture. It
is more productive therefore, to ask with Koolhaas and
Sola-Morales, not what this dream means, but rather
what does it provoke us to do?which may be its
meaning after all (fig. 14).
The story of the Barcelona Pavilion is not bracketed
between construction and demolition, but rather by a
broader history that includes the photographs of that
building and the changing interpretations of those
photographs. It is not the image of the Barcelona
Pavilion that is unstable, but the combined effect of the
texts constructed from those images. The stories about
the pavilion demonstrate this inherent paradox; they
oscillate between modern and post-modern, open and
closed, fascist and pacifist, fragment and whole,
independent and contingent, sky and mirror. Kracauer
explains, "The spatial continuum from the camera's
perspective dominates the spatial appearance of the
perceived object; the resemblance between the image
and the object effaces the contours of the object's
'history/ Never before has a period known so little about
itself." Echoing Freud, Kracauer concludes, "That the
world devours [photographs] is a sign of the fear of
death. What the photographs by their sheer
accumulation attempt to banish is the recollections of
death, which is part and parcel of every memory
image"95 (fig. 15). The Barcelona Pavilion is a
"photographic message," which, as Kracauer and Roland
Barthes remind us, "is a continuous message."96 The
94. J?rgen Habermas, "Modernity?An Incomplete Project," in 77?e
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1983), p. 12.
95. Kracauer (see note 2), pp. 58-59.
96. See Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message," Image-Music
Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 17.
 Dodds: Body in pieces 1 91

Berliner Bild-Bericht prints continue to occupy the

absolute present every time we are caught in the
"delirious associations" of their "irrational knowledge."97
While its ?mages may be worn out, the continued
reinterpretation of the photographs of the pavilion is
testimony to "the necessity of its rebirth in that present
absolute which is the work of art."98

97. Salvador Dali, "The Conquest of the Irrational," in

Conversations with Dali (New York, Dutton, 1969), p. 115.
98. Argan (see note 22), p. 18.

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