mies barcelona-exterior

 

It was sublimely exhilarating to float through this piece of "constructivist sculpture" conceived over eight decades ago now by that most rigorous of German architects, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, for the Barcelona International Exposition in 1929 [and faithfully reconstructed in 1986 on its original site as a lasting monument to the International Style in modern architecture] ...

I stepped lightly upon an altar of Roman travertine, transversed by planes of metal framed glass and panels of green Alpine marble and golden onyx from the Atlas Mountains...and entered a minimalist shrine of asymmetrical spatial flow contained by exquisite materials gleaming, reflecting, uplifting in the ever changing light...

  

the enticing nude [that has been referred to alternatively as "Amanecer"/"Alba"/"Morgen"/"Dawn" by the German sculptor Georg Kolbe, 1877-1947], embraced by the hallucinatory marble walls, is a curvaceous yet solid antependium inserted in this corner of the altar exposed to the hard rays of the summer sun and the soft rains of winter...

  

the ablution sheet of water in the black marble pool is gently rippled by fresh drops of rain and the stray fallen leaf...

  

small seas of light and dark soundlessly bound the pavilion front and back with the tranquil and poetic reflection of water playing off the polished glaze of fossilized stone...

  

I traversed along stretches of pale travertine still glistening from the rain and framing lush foliage...

enclosed by immutable precision, by luminous fluidity, by exacting ideology, by an odd sense of purity...

  

I remember looking at grainy black and white photographs of this pavilion reproduced in my old copy of Vincent Scully's Modern Architecture when I was a Fine Arts student taking some courses in architectural history - and these were images of the original structure from 1929 as it was soon demolished after the exposition...

[it was cool to realize that the shot below of the view from the end of the front court is almost identical to one in the book!]

  

I was on hallowed ground of one of modern architecture's most numinous pantheon and we were alone under the gray muted skies of Barcelona, taking hushed steps towards a beckoning "Dawn" in the consecrated distance...

Pavello Mies van der Rohe 

Av. Marquès de Comillas s/n, Parc de Montjuic, 08038 Barcelona

"No work other than the Barcelona Pavilion could symbolize the still fresh possibilities of a modern language of architecture. To the extent that modernism's supposed "coldness" had become a postmodern cliché, Mies's sensuous materials - red silk curtains, four different types of plate glass, and stone surfaces of golden onyx, Roman travertine, and green Alpine marble - fairly startled the eyes of those who had only known the structure from black-and-white photographs. Equally in keeping with the mood of the day were the spatial ambiguities and the palpable juxtapositions of the human figure - both the female nude of Georg Kolbe's statue The Dawn and the visitor's - with myriad abstract reflective surfaces. Given the particular vibrancy of that part of contemporary architecture in Spain that is directly or indirectly influenced by Mies's classic Minimalism - with new found associations of material and spatial sensuousness - it is hard to deny the importance of the Barcelona Pavilion's somewhat ahistorical reappearance. As if having arrived directly from the more radical moment of its creation, it exists as a negation of the International Style's subsequent dilutions and presents itself as a fresh point of departure."*

[*from page 29 of an essay by Terence Riley, "Contemporary Architecture in Spain: Shaking Off the Dust" in On-Site: NEW ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN, 2005 The Museum of Modern Art, New York]

barcelona lush

  

"the pungent oranges and bright, green wings 

seem things in some procession of the dead,

winding across wide water, without sound."

"does ripe fruit never fall?  or do the boughs 

hang always heavy in that perfect sky..."*

  

I long to live in a grove of orange trees heavy with ripe fruit and clamourous with the shrill chirping of cockatiels even on chilly winter days...

we wander into an immaculate courtyard of a convent converted to art school crowded with lush green boughs sweetly pixellated with orange dots...

 

and in a garden high above the city, a lemon tree harbours delusions of mediterranean warmth yielding to its teeming need to fruit abundantly...

  

while below in the concrete zoo, tropical plants spike up from the top of a wall behind which exotic animals live out their lives in mostly quiet but hopefully well-fed desperation...

but not this cat which hunts in conspicuous non-camouflage amongst a cultivated and well-tended palm garden below the modest casas staggering down a steep slope...

 

at Gaudi's rock-and-rolling Parc Guell, century plants erupt in dangerous sword clumps to fend off invaders until they flower just once many years on after which they promptly shrivel up due to such laborious reproductory exertion...

 

a cool century later, in a stainless steel park below the smooth cucumber-shaped Torre Agbar, designer cacti are arranged meticulously in stacked metal pots and on top of posts contorting our expectations of landscape design and the urban-nature spatial experience...

 

around the corner from where we were staying, a private babylon drapes luxuriantly off a tiny balconey - a natural green-screen to the visual - and airy -  pollution of living in micro-medieval quarters...

"what is divinity if it can come

only in silent shadows and in dreams?

shall she not find in comforts of the sun, 

in pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else 

in any balm or beauty of the earth, 

things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?"*

[*selected lines from Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning",1915/1923]

barcelona parallax

I am in a city I haven't been to for over 20 years...a city in the invigorating throes of resumption, progression, self-determination...
we stay in the Barri Gotic, immersed in its medieval murkiness that is now tinged with fresh youthful hits, and yet on dark cloudy days, we are reeled back to a shadowy and more beguiling world...



but under sunny catalonian skies, we emerge to more recent times and wind our way up voluptuous architecture from the love-laboured hands of Antoni Gaudi and stand high above a crystalline city gleaming on the edge of the Mediterranean...[on the roof of Casa Batllo, below pic]


the giddily honey-combed Sagrada Familia is an almost never-ending project - and the tenacious spirit of Gaudi continues to preside over its organic construction from his resting place in the crypt...



the Mercat del Born is under renovations to update its airy metal-laced volumes to house and display again the poetically luscious arrangements of catalonian bounty...


and from an architectural pilgrimage to the Pavello Mies van der Rohe, reconstituted from its original manifestation at the 1929 International Exhibition, I lean over the slightly tattered barcelona chairs to peer past the mossy green marble wall from a glassed-in space that is the epitomized prototype of modern structural revelation...

on to venture into the 21st century thrusting of power-towers punctuating the catalonian nightsky in conical light curtains... a plump and sexy beacon to taunt that skeletal iron maiden to the colder north...[Torre Agbar, above pic]