Barcelona Pavilion (Barcelona, Spain) : Court and large water basin, overall view looking southwest

Creator:

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 1886-1969

Published/Created:

Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
1929 ; 1986

Date Depicted:

2008
1900 AD - 1949 AD

Materials:

steel; glass; marble; travertine; onyx

Notes:

It was not, however, until 1929 that the ideas of the earlier experimental period were finally realized in one of the most important buildings of the Modern Movement, the German (or Barcelona) Pavilion (destroyed; reconstructed 1986), Montjuïc, Barcelona. It was a last-minute addition to the German section of the Exposición Internacional in Barcelona in 1929 for which Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich (with whom he collaborated on exhibition projects) had been given overall design responsibility by the government in 1928. Here Mies van der Rohe used the open (decellurized) plan as an architectural analogy of the social and political openness to which the new German republic aspired. Space-defining elements were dissociated from the structural columns, planning was free and open, merging interior and exterior spaces: unbroken podium and roof planes were held apart by a regular grid of slender cruciform steel columns, giving a clear field for spatial design, using opaque, translucent and transparent walls freely disposed between the columns. These ideas were crucial to all his subsequent work. The rich materials of the space-defining walls, the reflecting pools-in one of which stands a sculpture by Georg Kolbe-and the furniture that he designed specifically for the pavilion (the well-known Barcelona chair, stools and table), all added to the architectonic qualities in a building of great poetic beauty.

Variant Titles:

German Pavilion

Topics:

Architecture -- Germany -- 20th century -- (YVRC)
Architecture -- Spain -- 20th century -- (YVRC)

Period/Style:

Modernist

Culture:

German

Accession Number:

1A1-MVR-BP-B1

Genre:

architecture (AAT)
pavilions (AAT)

Format:

Image

Content Type:

Sculptures, Models, & Architecture

Rights:

Copyright Scott Gilchrist, Archivision, Inc
The use of this image may be subject to the copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) or to site license or other rights management terms and conditions. The person using the image is liable for any infringement.

Access Restrictions:

Yale Community Only

Digital:

architectural exteriors; commercial and industrial design; world's fairs Bauhaus; Modernist buildings; exhibition buildings

Source Creator:

Gilchrist, Scott

Source Title:

Archivision Addition Module Five

Source Created:

2878 Chamonix, Montreal QC
Archivision, Inc.
2008

Source Note:

Purchase, Visual Resources Collection, May, 2011; photographer Scott Gilchrist

Yale Collection:

Visual Resources Collection

Digital Collection:

Visual Resources Collection

Local Record Number:

4090

OID:

10054635

PID:

digcoll:1841712