Until November 27, the intervention "mies missing materiality" of Anna & Eugeni Bach, teacher at La Salle-URL, which consists in the conversion of the Mies van der Rohe pavilion into a life-size model, with only one material, can visit. On November 27, the intervention will end with a dismantling.
THE TRANSFORMATION PROGRESS
This simple act turns the Pavilion into a 1:1 scale mock-up, a representation of itself that opens the door to multiple interpretations about aspects like the value of the original, the role of the white surface as an image of modernity and the importance of materiality in the perception of space.
The Pavilion in Barcelona upon which we act is a reconstruction, a replica so faithful to the original that it is often difficult to remember its true nature. A building that should have been temporary was immortalised first by the written account of the modern movement and later by its own reconstruction.
Turning the Pavilion into a mock-up, with all the surfaces restricted to the same material, as white as it is indeterminate, reveals the building’s representative role both that of the original, as a national symbol, and that of the replica, by representing the former. For a time, the Pavilion will be the longest-standing 1:1 scale mock-up of the replica of the temporary pavilion in modern architecture.
To provide the Pavilion in Barcelona with that homogenising whiteness means to endow it with one of the defining features of modern historiography (not of modernity). Yet at the same time, it also involves stripping the Pavilion of its materiality and its unique characteristics—specifically the one that erected it as an icon of the modern movement.
The installation turns this paradox into an experience. It helps visitors to consider these ideas and many more through their own experience in a pavilion that will lose all trace of its materiality for a few days to assume all its representative potential.
Eugeni Bach, Barcelona, Spain 1974.
- Architect by the School of Architecture of Barcelona, UPC, 1999.
- Assistant professor in the Vertical Workshop of the ESARQ UIC, Barcelona, directed by Winy Maas (1998) and Duncan Lewis (1999).
- Professor of the Mies van der Rohe Chair, ETSAB UPC, under the direction of David Chipperfield (2001).
- Professor of Projects at the School of Architecture La Salle, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona (2005 - present).
- Professor of Projects at the Higher Technical School of Barcelona, Polytechnic University of Catalonia. (2015 - present).