The photographic gaze of Mies. The MIES Project, Architectural Portraits by Arina Dähnick

The Fundació Mies van der Rohe and "La Caixa" Foundation present the exhibition by the Berlin photographer Arina Dähnick, The MIES Project. Architectural Portraits, which, divided between the CaixaForum Barcelona and the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, can be visited until June 6, 2021.

The exhibition shows for the first time in Spain a selection of Arina Dähnick's photographs, which portray Mies's work through different lighting and weather conditions, playing with the reflections of the materials and the relationship of the buildings with their context.

The MIES Project. Architectural Portraits by Arina Dähnick. Photograph by Anna Mas.

The exhibition is a great opportunity to see Arina Dähnick's interpretation of Mies van der Rohe's work in the context of a Mies building and the CaixaForum. The Fundació Mies van der Rohe e and "La Caixa" Foundation have selected and arranged the photographs so that they relate to the architectural environment of the two buildings, as well as to the rest of the works of art contained in them.

"Together with Adriana Mas and the CaixaForum team, we decided to use the longest wall in CaixaForum’s entrance space, next to the mural by Sol Le Witt, “Splat” and “Spatial environment 51-A1” by Lucio Fontana, to present 11 photos and the 8 vertical grey glass panels and the 2 white ones, next to Georg Kolbe’s Morning sculpture here in the Barcelona Pavilion to show 8 photos which are presented for the first time and 4 others that depict the Barcelona Pavilion and the Neue Nationalgalerie".

Ivan Blasi.

Arina Dähnick has photographed Mies van der Rohe buildings all over the world since she discovered the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2012 under the light of a thunderstorm and took photos of it until its closure in 2015 under different atmospheric conditions. The images of her play with the perception of the viewer offering a multilayer reading of the buildings of the German architect and making use of various photographic techniques, such as blurring and focus.

"We met Arina Dähnick in summer 2018 just after she had taken the photos of the Barcelona Pavilion and we were honored to add a selection of her photos to the collection of Fundació Mies van der Rohe. It was then when she was organizing the presentation of her photos in Chicago, Brno, Barcelona and Berlin. Since then, we have worked to present the photos that today you are able to see here in the Barcelona Pavilion and in CaixaFòrum, two extraordinary architectural masterpieces, one by Domènech i Montaner from 1911 transformed by Asarta, Luna, Brufau and Isozaki in the 90s, and the other by Reich and Mies van der Rohe from 1929, rebuilt in 1986 by Solà-Morales, Ramos and Cirici".

Ivan Blasi.

Description of project by Fundació Mies van der Rohe

Fundació Mies van der Rohe and CaixaForum present “The MIES Project. Architectural Portraits”, a photographic Mies van der Rohe Pavilion and CaixaForum. The opening took place on Thursday 6 May at 18h with a conversation between the artist and Michelangelo Sabatino which marked the start of the programme of activities proposed by the entity for Barcelona Architecture Week.

This is the first time that photographer Arina Dähnick presents her work in Barcelona and she will do it simultaneously in two emblemàtic, neighbouring spaces: the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion and CaixaForum Barcelona.

Her delicate photographs portray the details of Mies van der Rohe’s works in different lighting and weather conditions that interact with the buildings and become architectural portraits.

Urban life and urbanity, the contrasts between indoors and outdoors, the lack of definition and focus, reflections and mirror images, the play with the viewer’s perception: these aret he pictorial topics of the photographer. Arina Dähnick discovered Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s architecture in 2012, when, after an electric storm, she perceived Neue Nationalgalerie as a fascinating and paradoxical spacial experience of unlimited immensity, and a simultaneous feeling of being retained. Since then, she photographed the building under different conditions until its closing in 2015. The photographer followed Mies van der Rohe’s steps from Berlin to Brno, from Chicago to New York and captured his most famous buildings, including the Mies van der Rohe Pavillion, Villa Tugendhat, the Seagram Building and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments, in some impressive series of potos that convey her creative inspiration and the spatial experience of architecture itself.

This photographic project, previously presented at the IIT College of Architecture in Chicago, the Farnsworth House in Plano and Villa Tugendhat in Brno, arrives now in Barcelona to interact with the city’s visitors.

“Certainly, these images are not just formal architectural photography, they represent a different way of seeing and reveal a poetic quality in Mies’s work that has so far largely been undiscovered. Dähnick works without a tripod, and while these images are not staged, they are nevertheless composed by a very discerning eye that often captures a moment that is not repeatable.”

Dirk Lohan, architect, Chicago

“The MIES Project reveal how, contrary to what advocates of postmodernism have claimed, Mies’s buildings engaged with their surrounding context. Thus, with their reflections and shadows, Arina Dähnick ’s architectural portraits add yet another layer of understanding to the complex legacy of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe."

Michelangelo Sabatino, architect, preservationist and architecture-art-design historian, Chicago

The presentation of the photographs is complemented by the publication Arina Dähnick – Architectural Portraits. The MIES Project.

Inventory of the presented work

11 photos at CaixaForum:
2 images Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, 1 Seagram Building, 1 IBM Building, 1 Farnsworth House, 2 Federal Centre, 1 S. R. Crown Hall, 1 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, 2 images900- 910 esplanade.
Photographs taken in the years 2017-2019

12 photos at Pavilion:
3 images Neue Nationalgalerie, 2 images Pavilion Mies van der Rohe, 2 Seagram Building, 2 Tugendhat House, 2 Farnsworth House, 1 Lemke House.
Photographs taken in the years 2013-2019

About the artistic interventions program at Mies van der Rohe Pavilion

Interventions by plastic artists devised for the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion normally take the form of installations or small-scale, short-term exhibitions.

This programming of the Pavilion’s exceptional spaces brings a unique type of activity to the city. The installations are a way of maintaining an active dialogue and giving sense to the Pavilion’s continuing topicality. A periodicity of 1-2 projects per year is planned, ensuring a proper balance between artistic and architectural contributions.

About the Pavilion

The Barcelona German Pavilion was designed by Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the German national pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition that was held in Montjuïc. This symbolic piece of work of the Modern Movement has been exhaustively studied and interpreted, while inspiring the work of several generations of architects. Built from glass, steel and different kinds of marble, the Pavilion was conceived to accommodate the oficial reception presided over by King Alfonso XIII of Spain along with the German authorities.

After the closure of the Exhibition, the Pavilion was disassembled in 1930. As time went by, it became a key point of reference not only in Mies van der Rohe’s own career but also in twentieth-century architecture as a whole. Given the significance and reputation of the Pavilion, thoughts turned towards its possible reconstruction.

In 1980, Oriol Bohigas promoted this initiative from the Urban Planning Delegation of the Barcelona City Council, and architects Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos were the ones appointed to the research, design and direction of the reconstruction of the Pavilion. Works began in 1983 and the new Building was inaugurated in 1986 on its original site.

Fundació Mies van der Rohe was created in 1983 by Barcelona’s City Council with the initial aim of carrying out the reconstruction of the German Pavilion. In addition to preserving and disseminating knowledge about the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, the Fundació promotes debate and awareness on contemporary architecture and urban Planning issues.

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Photographs of the exhibition in the Mies Barcelona pavilion. The MIES Project. Architectural Portraits by Arina Dähnick.

Photographs of the exhibition in Caixa Forum Barcelona. The MIES Project. Architectural Portraits by Arina Dähnick.

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More information

Label

Artist

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Arina Dähnick.

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Dates

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From May 6 to June 6, 2021.

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Location

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Mies van der Rohe´s Barcelona Pavilion.- Av. Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, 7, Barcelona. CaixaForum Barcelona.- Av. Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, 6-8, Barcelona.

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Organisation and production

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Fundació Mies Van der Rohe Barcelona, "La Caixa" Foundation.

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Photography

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Anna Mas.

Arina DÄHNICK

Arina Dähnick, an active photographer in the fields of fine arts and architecture lives and works in Berlin. Having grown up in a creative family, she came into contact with art and photography at a very youn age.

She had her first professional photographic exhibition when she was 17 years old. When, in 1986, Arina Dähnick decided not to make a living of her art, it led to a long pause in her production. The presentation of her work at the Leica Camera Blog 2014 was followed by countless exhibitions, as well as publications in newspapers and magazines. She made a name for herself both in Germany and abroad and gained a firm position on the international photographic scene with her series Perfect Life, Contemporary Architecture Barcelona and The MIES Project.

When she visits the world’s metropolises, she always has a legendary Leica M camera (an unusual option for architectural photography). Thus, the artist follows her photographical intuition, selects the angle and distance, the mood that different moments of the day and different seasons bring, sets the aperture, the exposure and the focus manually. She does not add anything to the result and constantly renounces any post-processing that might manipulate the images.

The key topics that Arina Dähnick approaches in her images are the life and urbanity of the city, the reflection and experience of space, the diametrical opposites of indoors and outdoors, of blurring and sharp clarity. Her extraordinary photographic eye penetrates the exterior façades in search of the poetic qualities and mysteries of urban space. With her camera she captures the soul of architecture, using colour and lines to create an intimate sensory experience of the spacian environment. The intertwined layers of images initiate a multifaceted play with reality and generate a perspective that is halfway between external reality and an imaginary inner eye.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in Aquisgran the 27th of Marz of 1886 and died in Chicago the 17th of August of 1969. He was active in Germany, from 1908 to 1938, when he moved to USA and where he was until his death. He was also considerate a “master” of the Modern Movement, since the 50s, and he was one of the fathers of this movement with Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mies van der Rohe, who in his childhood was guided by masters as Hendrik Petrus Berlage or Peter Behrens, he always kept tabs of the Villlet-Le-Duc’s rationalism or Karl Friedrich Schinkel eclectic classicism, having a strong connection with the architectural historicism. As he said in his manifesto “Baukunst und Zeiwille” about this: “it is not possible to move on looking back”.

In 1900 he began to work with his father in the stone workshop of the family and shortly afterward he move to Berlin to work with Bruno Paul in 1902, designing furniture. He planned his first house in 1907, the “Riehl House” in Neubabelsbers and worked from 1908 to 1911 in Peter Behrens’s studio. There he was influenced by structural technics and designs based on steel and glass, as the AEG project in Berlin. While he was in Behrens’s studio he designed the Perls House.

In 1912 he openned his own studio and projected a house in The Hague for Kröller-Müller marriage. The studio received few jobs in its first years, but Mies, contrary to architects as Le Corbusier, in his first years he already showed an architectural policy to follow, being an architect that changed little his architectural philosophy. To his epoch belonged the Heertrasse House and Urbig House as his principal projects.

In 1913 se move to the outskirts of Berlin with his wife Ada Bruhn with whom he would have three kids. The family broke up when Mies was posted to Romania during the World War I.

In 1920, Ludwig Mies changed his surname to Mies van der Rohe and in 1922 he joined as member to the “Novembergruppe”. One year later, in 1923, he published the magazine “G” with Doesburg Lisstzky and Rechter. During this period he worked in two houses, the Birck House and the Mosler House. In 1926, Mies van der Rohe held the post of chief commissioner of the German Werkbund exhibition, being his president this year. In this period he projected the Wolf House in Guden and the Hermann Lange House in Krefeld and in 1927, he met the designer Lilly Reich, in the house exhibition of Weissenhof, where he was director, and he planned a steel structure block for her.

In 1929, he received the project the German National Pavilion to the International Exhibition of Barcelona) rebuilt in 1986=, where he included the design of the famous Barcelona Chair.

In 1930, he planned in Brün – present Czech Republic -, the Tugendhat Villa. He managed the Dessau’s Bauhaus until his closure in 1933. The Nazism forced Mies to emigrate to the United States in 1937. He was designated chair of the Architecture department in Armour Institute in 1938, the one that later merged with the Lewis Institute, forming the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and where he took the responsibility to build a considerable extent of the foundations of the Intitute from 1939 and 1958. One of the buildings of this complex is the Crown Hall, IIT (1950-1956).

In 1940, he met the person who would be his partner until his death, Lora Marx. He became citizen of the USA in 1944 and, one year later, he began with the Farnsworth House’s project (1945-1950). During this stage, in 1948, he designed his first skyscraper: the two towers of the Lake Drive Apartments in Chicago, which were finished in 1951. Shortly after, he planned other building of this typology, the Commonwealth Promenade Apartments, from 1953 to 1956.

In 1958 he projected his most important work: the Segram Building in New York. This building has 37 storeys, covered with glass and bronze, which built and planned with Philip Johnson. He retired from the Illinois Institute of Technology the same year. He also built more towers and complexes as: the Toronto Dominion Centre (1963-1969) and the Westmount Square (1965-1968) and designed the New Square and Office Tower of The City of London (1967).

From 1962 to 1968, he built the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which would be his last legacy to the architecture. The building that rose as exhibition hall is made of steel, glass and granite.

He died in Chicago the 17th of August if 1969 leaving behind a large legacy and influence to next generations.

The Mies van der Rohe’s most famous sentences are “Less is more” and “God is in the details”.