Mies Van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion Interior Perspective, 1928
©2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

I’ll open the log with this fascinating montage from Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. The level to which this drawing reveals both Mies’ intention and his investigation of space is a one time clarity of process that I wish I could find for so many other projects.

The radical nature of the drawing is how Mies describes space. He places general elements around the empty plane of the drawing without a ground or ceiling. The ground plane, arguably the basis from where architecture is experienced, is not there. Its absence in a drawing meant to relay an experience of architecture is a clear shift away from the issues painters had experienced in portraying realistic foreshortening of the ground previous to the invention of perspective. In this drawing, the most important plane is the drawing itself – the plane from which space is experienced. By removing the representation of the ground, Mies separates the difference between the experience of a representational drawing, and the experience of the thing itself. What the ground is in architecture, the image plane is in a drawing.

Although I haven’t been there, I’m interested in how the representations of this project, from analytical drawings to photographs, have created its relative importance in architectural history. The pavilion has a history of challenging the documentation of architecture, from Mies’ constant editing and cropping of published photographs, to its resurrection after an almost sixty year absence. Only a small number of documents existed in that time, and are still the only remnants of the actual pavilion constructed in 1929. The original pavilion had its photographs, and now its duplicate has duplicate photographs. The building, unlike most others, has been represented not only through photographs and drawings, but also through architecture. Its duplicate does not exist to serve as anything except to re-present a previous architecture. Much like the duplicate Eiffel Towers around the world, the current pavilion exists as an allusion to another reality. Little did Mies know that the pavilion would not only disrupt the connection of a representation from its subject, but also the reexamine the reality of the subject. Is the current pavilion as fulfilling a representation as photographs of the original pavilion? Is the drawing deeper than the plane we see?