Summary of paper given at Docomomo International Conference, Paris 2002
The Barcelona World Expo of 1929
was proposed by the Dictator General Primo de Rivera, who personally endorsed
Noucentiste architecture and design, which comprised simplified classical forms
and decoration. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, left-wing
Spanish architects supported the Modern Movement programme of construction and
of social values.
Into this battleground the German
Pavilion by Mies Van Der Rohe appeared. The effect was astonishing. Left-wing
architects responded to the presence of the Pavilion by staging an exhibition
of their work at the avant-garde Dalmau Gallery. The public response to the
exhibition was extreme, and provoked demonstrations and rioting. How many
buildings have provoked a riot?
In Milan Kundera’s book
‘Immortality’, he describes the process of ‘a gradual, general planetary
transformation of ideology into imagology’. Ideology serves political ideals
and social values. Imagology dilutes this into ‘a series of suggestive images
and slogans’, which ultimately serve commercial ideals.
Mies himself was a perpetrator of
imagology. Oscar Tusquets in his thoughtful and provocative book, ‘Mas que
discutible’ (More than debatable) discusses Mies in his essay ‘Bello o
fotogenico?’ (beautiful or photogenic?). The first photographs, those that are
imprinted into history, were staged by Mies without the encumbrance of doors,
to improve the sense of spatial flow. ‘… and this contrived image is that which
passed into history, so successfully that the architects responsible for the
Pavilion’s reconstruction had to go through anonymous press photos … before
they could work out how it really was …’.
The Mies Pavilion was a symbol of
political ideology so strong that its presence provoked riots. But from Mies’
staged photographs, to its use as a location in advertisements, to its status
as a temple to Modernist architecture revered by students, the Pavilion has
been reduced to a ‘type’ and the meaning it embodies is an imagologue’s dream.
This paper focuses on ideals and
images in relation to the Barcelona Mies Pavilion.