The intervention in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion shows us the rubble and the waste to establish a link with the history of the Pavilion while raising questions of sustainability for the present. The voids in the travertine slab are an analogy to a stratigraphic grating system excavation, commonly used in archeology.
The Fundació Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with Elisava, has created an action that is situated between birth, death, and rebirth. The raised travertine slabs invite us to discover the history of a Pavilion that is no longer limited to projecting an identical image of the original mythical.
Description of project by Fundació Mies van der Rohe
Beautiful failures
Fundació Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with the Master in Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces by Elisava, presents, from 15 to 18 April 2021, Beautiful failures, a site-specific piece at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion.
This intervention, resulting from the academic work of the master’s students and tutored by Stella Rahola Matutes, sculptor and installation artist, and Dr. Roger Paez, Profesor and researcher in Elisava, works on fragility, identfying the two most delicate materials used in the construction of the Pavilion: glass and the travertine of the pavement. Glass is the Pavilion’s paradigmatic material, with its constant play of reflections and transparencies, while the travertine plinth is one of the most identifiable elements of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture. Consequently, the installation proposal Beautiful Failures is based on a fundamental material order that allows us to revisit this seemingly polished, perfect and safe architecture from its most vulnerable side.
“The actions and performances resulting from academic collaborations activate the Pavilion as a public platform to dissolve the boundaries between architectural research and the arts, bring together and generate synergies between the academic world, artistic production and architectural culture, and build around the Fundació Mies van der Rohe an extensive and varied network of entities and people who love architecture in Barcelona and everywhere else."
Anna Ramos, director of the Fundació Mies van der Rohe
From the formal point of view, the resolution of the installation consists of 17 raised travertine slabs that reveal the under-space resulting from a construction system that diverges from the solution of the original Pavilion. These 17 holes contain defective pieces of glass, originally from artisan workshops in the city of Barcelona. The glass pieces correspond to the collection made by the students of more than 2,000 units discarded by craftsmen’s workshops. They are made of borosilicate glass of German origin, which cannot be recycled in our country. The rubble and discarded pieces make it possible to establish a link with the Pavilion’s past history, while raising questions of sustainability for the present at the same time.
The new landscape resulting from the partial lifting of the pavement and the relationship with the pieces of glass finds analogies with a stratigraphic excavation using a grid system, commonly used in archaeology. The proposal is a ceremonial action that rides between the discovery and the funerary act, between that which is mortuary and that which is revealed to us. The temporary intervention in the Pavilion is understood simultaneously as a rite of discovery and burial. And in this cycle of birth, death and rebirth, all the elements play an important role, from the history of the Pavilion itself, implicit in the actions with the travertine, to the life accumulated in each of the pieces of glass.
Beautiful Failures also wants to be a reflection on the nature of a Pavilion that is no longer just a replica but a living entity that is no longer limited to projecting an identical image of the mythical original. Through multiple artistic interventions, from 1996 to the present day, the characteristic temporality of the 1929 Pavilion has been reinterpreted as a sensorial temporality, turning the current Pavilion into a multiform and organic space capable of reflecting on its spatial, material and historical qualities through constant change. A valuable lesson in an enriched understanding of identity.
"Beautiful Failures is a dream come true: transforming the Mies Pavilion, one of the freatest references of modern architecture, from a radically temporary sensibility. For MEATS (Master in Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces) and Elisava, it means becoming a part of an exciting project where, for 25 years, interventions by artists, architects and designers have reinterpreted the inexhaustible quality of the Pavilion."
Roger Paez, director of the Master in Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces by Elisava.
