Tomorrow, Thursday, June 2 marks the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of the reconstruction of Mies van der Rohe on the same site that occupied the building built by German architect for the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929.

An unusual gesture now is celebrated: 30 years ago the possibility to enjoy tangible way to the experience of being in the Pavilion, a building that responds to the maxim of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) "Less is more" was recovered.
For this, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe invites us to enjoy the Pavilion through the reinterpretation by Luís Martínez Santa-María, who has reinterpreted the ancient Ionic columns of Puig i Cadafalch.
 

Description of the project Luis Martínez Santa-María and Roger Sauquet Llonch
 

"I don’t want to change the world. I only want to express it”


More than one hundred used and discarded industrial drums have been de-painted, stripped and sprayed with water under pressure to remove the homogeneity of their surface finish and to deactivate their past. The result of its vertical superposition is a set of columns made up of cylindrical, scratched and irregular surfaces, on which the traces of mechanical tools and hand gestures are imprinted. Brands full of life to which we must add the contribution of atmospheric agents, humidity, rain, sun, which will improve the appearance of the drums by damaging them even more over time.

At the foot of Montjuic, the shadow on which each of these eight columns seem to rest on the ground would like to point out the insubstantial quality of these junk shafts. And it is that each column would like to claim for itself the least possible weight, to show that there is no weight in this regrouping of drums from different sources, of different colors about to dissolve forever and of trademarks that are blurred together, drum to drum, by means of coarse weld seams.

There has been talk of the verticality of the columns against which the horizontality of the German Pavilion was contrasted in 1929. But it was rather time, it was time that against which the pavilion was opposed, the silent time of the pavilion against the time of the ancient columns. With their evident ease, the eight columns of drums recreate that other time, a different time, which comes to be deposited together with the silent time, the silent place, of the admirable and luminous pavilion of Mies.

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Luis Martínez Santa-María (Madrid, 1960), PhD architect for the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. He studied at the Madrid Higher Technical School of Architecture where he is currently Professor of Architectural Designs.

Among other recognitions, he has received the Madrid City Council Architecture Prize (1991), the Manuel Oraá y Arcocha Prize (1997), the ASCER Prize (2005), the Hispalyt Prize (2009), the Fritz Höger Silver Prize (2014), the FAD Award (2017) and the Luis Moreno Mansilla Award (2017).

He is also the author of the books: The tree, the road, the pond before the house (2004) (Extraordinary Prize of Doctoral Theses of the UPM), Intersections (2005), The book of the rooms (2011), Principles (2012) , Superposiciones (2018), Contact (2020) and The expression of weight (2021), a book also published in English (The expression of weight), as a result of the research carried out during his stay at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (2012).

Luis Martínez Santa-María has been a Member of the Quality Commission of the City of Madrid (2010-2011), Member of the Commission for the Protection of the Historic-Artistic Heritage of the Madrid City Council (2012-2018) and Director of the collection of La Cimbra books, from the Caja de Arquitectos Foundation (2005-2015).
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