The Barcelona Pavilion of Mies van der Rohe
Why is it significant?
Look at the long flat roof that seems to float above the ground, the walls of polished stone that stop short of meeting each other, and the shallow pool reflecting the sky.
Key Facts
| Place | The Barcelona Pavilion of Mies van der Rohe |
|---|---|
| Address | Avinguda de Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia 7, 08038 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.37060, 2.15000 |
| Part of Walk | Montjuïc, the Hill of Big Dreams: Barcelona's 1929 Expo, Olympic Ring & Castle |
| Generated | Generated |
Look at the long flat roof that seems to float above the ground, the walls of polished stone that stop short of meeting each other, and the shallow pool reflecting the sky. After the brick castles and baroque fountains around it, this feels like a building from another century... because, in spirit, it is.
This is the German Pavilion for the 1929 Exposition, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe together with the designer Lilly Reich. The strange thing is that it exhibited nothing. Other countries filled their halls with machines and wine. Germany, still recovering from defeat and inflation, sent an empty building and said, in effect: this is who we are now. Calm, modern, open.
Walk inside and follow the materials: Roman travertine underfoot, green marble from the Alps, and one wall of golden onyx, chosen, it is said, from a single block so that its veins run like a mirror. The roof rests on slim cross-shaped columns clad in chrome, so the walls carry nothing and can stand wherever they like. In a small pool at the back stands a bronze woman by Georg Kolbe, called Alba, the Dawn, raising her arms as if waking up.
The famous Barcelona Chair, the leather and steel seat now copied in a thousand corporate lobbies, was designed for this pavilion, intended for the King and Queen of Spain at the opening. Legend says they never actually sat down in them. The building was dismantled in 1930, after the Exposition, and for decades it survived only in black-and-white photographs, growing more famous with every architecture student who studied them.
In the 1980s three Catalan architects rebuilt it on the same plot, from those photographs and fragments of the plans, and it reopened in 1986. So what you are seeing is a copy that has become the original. Next, keep to the right along the avenue, towards a fortified gate that looks like it was borrowed from a medieval Castilian town.