The Fundació Mies van der Rohe periodically invites artists and architects to provoke new looks and reflections through their interventions in the Pavilion.

After SANAA, Jeff Wall, Ai Wei Wei, Enric Miralles, Jordi Bernadó, Andrés Jaque and Antoni Muntadas among others, this year Anna & Eugeni Bach will be in charge of transforming the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion with their project “Mies missing materiality “.

The artistic intervention will turn the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion into a real-size model for eleven days, dressing it with a unique material to undress it of all its materiality.

In the words of the authors “The Mies van der Rohe Pavilion will be dressed to undress it of all its materiality. […] The Pavilion will, for a time, be the scale model 1:1 of the longest temporary pavilion of modern architecture.”

The transformation will be complete by 16 November 2017, when it will stage a debate between Anna and Eugeni Bach and other architects María Langarita and Carlos Quintáns.

The panels will be removed on 27 November 2017, restoring the pavilion to its previous state.


 

Description of project by Anna & Eugeni Bach

“Dressing the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion to strip it of all materiality.

This simple act turns the Pavilion into a 1:1 scale mock-up, a representation of itself that opens the door to multiple interpretations about aspects like the value of the original, the role of the white surface as an image of modernity and the importance of materiality in the perception of space.

The Pavilion in Barcelona upon which we act is a reconstruction, a replica so faithful to the original that it is often difficult to remember its true nature. A building that should have been temporary was immortalised first by the written account of the modern movement and later by its own reconstruction.

Turning the Pavilion into a mock-up, with all the surfaces restricted to the same material, as white as it is indeterminate, reveals the building’s representative role—both that of the original, as a national symbol, and that of the replica, by representing the former. For a time, the Pavilion will be the longest-standing 1:1 scale mock-up of the replica of the temporary pavilion in modern architecture.

Removing all materiality from the Pavilion also raises other interpretations related to the historiography of 20th-century architecture.

The Pavilion in Barcelona was enthroned as an icon of modernity at the ‘Modern Architecture’ exhibition at the MoMA in New York in 1932. The exhibition catalogue presents various buildings by architects like Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Neutra, Wright, Oud, Gropius and others through a selection of photographs and critical essays in which Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock indicate the homogenising criteria for combining all the works through the same lens. These include the white surface as an emblem of a new architecture, which appears as one of the most insistent.

To provide the Pavilion in Barcelona with that homogenising whiteness means to endow it with one of the defining features of modern historiography (not of modernity). Yet at the same time, it also involves stripping the Pavilion of its materiality and its unique characteristics—specifically the one that erected it as an icon of the modern movement.

The installation turns this paradox into an experience. It helps visitors to consider these ideas and many more through their own experience in a pavilion that will lose all trace of its materiality for a few days to assume all its representative potential”.

 

 

More information

Anna Bach, Nummi, Finland, 1973. Architect from the Helsinki University of Technology (2001) and Master in Project Theory and Practice from ETSAB, UPC. She is a PDI professor at EINA, Barcelona University Center for Design and Art, UAB. His work has been awarded, among others, with the International FAD Award, the FAD Ephemeral Work Award and the FAD Opinion Award on four occasions, as well as Finalist and Selected in the Spanish Biennial and the Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, Nominated for the European Architecture Mies van der Rohe and exhibited in venues such as the Cité de l'Architecture in Paris or the Spanish Pavilion at the XV Venice Biennale.

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Eugeni Bach, Barcelona, Spain 1974. Architect by the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Barcelona, UPC (1999), Professor of Projects at the ETSAB UPC and the Master EPAI of the ETS Arquitectura La Salle, URL. His work has been awarded, among others, with the International FAD Award, the FAD Award for Ephemeral Work and the FAD of Opinion on four occasions, as well as a Finalist and Selected in the Spanish Biennial and the Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, Nominated for the Award of European Architecture Mies van der Rohe and exhibited in venues such as the Cité de l'Architecture in Paris or the Spanish Pavilion at the VII and XV Venice Biennale.

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Published on: November 9, 2017
Cite: "Mies missing materiality by Anna & Eugeni Bach" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/mies-missing-materiality-anna-eugeni-bach> ISSN 1139-6415
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