GAD Editorial · Published ·
It stood for less than a year, was demolished, and is now one of the most influential buildings of the twentieth century. The German Pavilion that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — with Lilly Reich — designed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition was never meant to be permanent. It was a reception hall for the king, a stage for German industry. Instead it became a manifesto.
The pavilion is radical in its emptiness. There are no doors in the conventional sense, no enclosed rooms. Eight cruciform steel columns carry a flat roof over a composition of freestanding planes: onyx, travertine, green marble, glass. Walls don't meet corners; they slide past each other, so space flows continuously and the visitor is always slightly unsure where inside ends and outside begins. It is the clearest physical expression of the modernist "free plan," and it was achieved with materials of almost Roman luxury — the famous golden onyx wall glows like something quarried from a dream.
The original was dismantled in 1930 and its materials dispersed. For half a century it survived only in photographs, which only deepened its myth. In 1986 the city of Barcelona rebuilt it on the original site, as faithfully as documentation allowed, and the reconstruction revealed something the photographs couldn't: the building is small, quiet, and exquisitely calibrated. Its influence — on minimalism, on the open-plan office, on every glass house that followed — is wildly out of proportion to its size.
A building that exists twice, once as an event and once as a monument, is a fitting emblem for modernism itself.
Key facts
- Completed: 1929 (for the Barcelona International Exposition); demolished 1930
- Location: Barcelona, Spain
- Architects: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Lilly Reich
- Recognition: reconstructed on the original site in 1986; widely regarded as a defining work of modernist architecture