Barcelona and Mies

By: Denver Sells

Reading about a building and actually seeing it are two different things.  When you go and visit the building in person, the dynamic of the space changes and becomes a real, tangible entity that can be physically experienced and creates an aura that is so much better than just seeing pictures... most of the time anyway.  Sometimes, the feeling experienced in the pictures is more preferable due to the almost lie or deception that a photo can create.  Thus is what happened this past weekend when I traveled to Barcelona and visited the Mis van der Rohe German Pavilion.

Overall, the building looks a lot better in pictures than what I have experienced in pictures or textbooks.  My first impression was of the size of the building. Maybe this was due to the close proximity to the large Barcelona Art Museum, which seemed to trump anything in the surrounding area just in scale, as well because the entire site was built onto the side of the hill.

The base of the pavilion creates a good heavy foundation element built out of travertine, the large green marble walls were appropriate and then finally the glazing was a proportional size, so overall, a good proportional system but just based on context and my previous conceptions of how it "should" look, it was still disappointingly small.

The glazing panels in themselves were impressive, any piece of glass that big or bigger is still impressive to me, even after serif countless examples of them.  The coolest part of the pavilion is the extremely shallow reflecting pool in front of the main entrance.  The other memorable piece was seeing the two original Barcelona chairs, especially for me because I have always wanted one of those chairs.  Overall, I am not a fan though.  It has become a piece of art instead of architecture, which as I have talked about in some of my previous, specifically about Zaha Hadid, really irritates me.  I feel that they are used as the model for architecture, despite them being pieces of art.  They have effectively lost all function as an architectural space and therefore should not be considered as the high model they often are believed to be.  I believe this ruins architecture and takes us away from that client interaction.

His attention to these details is a lot better represented in his Neue Nationalgallerie museum in Berlin, Germany, which I have also visited this semester.  This building is a better representation of scale, site, and effectiveness of the overall concept, even though the thought is almost the same. If I were to pick only one or the other of these two buildings, I would definitely pick the Neue Nationalgalerie as far as overall design effectiveness and conveyance of the idea.  However, I do appreciate and am able to see in both buildings the same architect and the same overarching ideas that Mis has created and I believe these can be learned from an adapted to what I can do as an architect.