MUNTADASOn Translation: Paper BP/MVDR

On mUNTADAS

Paper BP/mVDRTranslation:

5 PREFACE Antoni Muntadas

14 THE PAVILION AND ITS ARCHIVE Xavier Costa

20 THE SmELL OF mIES Beatriz Colomina

28 THE SmELLS OF HISTORY Marco De Michelis

PrefaceAntoni muntadas

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On receiving the invitation from the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, I realized that my task consisted of intervening rather than exhibiting, of endowing the Pavilion with another dimension, of activating it in a different way. My research process led me to regard Mies van der Rohe from a personal viewpoint and the Pavilion as a built entity. The other conceptual and perceptive dimension might be provided by smell as a point of reference. I decided that these two directions were inappropriate: neither his biography, nor the materials associated with the building –marble, metal, hides, carpets and so on–, nor anything related to its construction.

The architectural report and the written history of the Pavilion constituted the lodestars that led me to react with a specific material: paper. This material forms part of architecture before, during and after the project, which in these times of “paperless architecture’ I felt we should remember. The fact that the Pavilion was disassembled in 1930, after its exhibition and use, and reconstructed in the late eighties, poses issues of temporariness and permanence, of decisions and interpretations, all of which are put to paper–correspondence, permits, press releases. This means that the Pavilion –its physical construction– existed when it was built in the late twenties and after 1986, when it was reconstructed. The project –the conceptual and documentary project– existed on paper during the intermediate period of this continuity. The “dissolved’ project, materialised on paper –drawings, photographs and texts– existed for over forty years, during which it was the only representation of the Pavilion.

The Pavilion’s architectural report, filed away, and the phenomenon of its existence over a long period in relation to paper and to printed documentation, led me once again to the perception of the smell associated with time, archives, closed space and the olfactory experience. The divulging and mediatic role of the Pavilion, and knowledge of it through writings, the press and bibliography, which has reached so many people, led me to another type of olfactory proposal.

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mies van der Rohe Archive,The museum of modern Art, New York

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Xavier Costa

The Pavilionand its Archive

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1. The mies van der Rohe ArchiveEarly in 1930, Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion in Barcelona started to be disassembled. After some fruitless attempts to sell it locally, nearly transformed into a restaurant, the German authorities decided to return the marble and stainless steel elements to Berlin for their resale. The dispersal of materials extended over different continents. Köstner und Gottschalk, the company that provided the marble slabs, opted to reuse them in Germany. Some fragments of the caramel-colored onyx wall ended up as table tops in Mies’ Chicago apartment and in Sergius Ruegenberg’s home in Berlin. Philip Johnson acquired one of the chairs for his collection. 1

At this point, the Pavilion’s existence retreated to a sole paper condition, to its archived materials and all the published documents that either reflected its making and presence, or elaborated on its significance in 20th-Century architecture. Mies had been keeping the office archive in Berlin, yet had to leave it behind when he hastily decided to depart for Chicago, in the Summer of 1937. Before the end of the war, his collaborator Lilly Reich, together with Eduard Ludwig –a former student of Mies at the Bauhaus- packed the entire archive in five wooden cases and sent it off to Ludwig’s parents home in Mühlhausen, a small town east of Kassel. This archive included all sorts of documents from the office, as well as from the years of his dedication to the Bauhaus: drawings, photographs, office files, correspondence, journals, competition documents.

Mülhausen location in East Germany made it impossible to attempt the recovery of the archive, even to consult it, during the Cold War years. Hans Maria Wringler of the Bauhaus archive in West Germany was the first person to check the condition of the archive, and Dirk Lohan, from Mies’ office, painfully negotiated for several years the return of the crates, that finally arrived in Chicago in 1963. 2

After the 1947 Mies exhibition organized by Philip Johnson, The Museum of Modern Art in New York started to request the donation of the drawings. Mies finally decided to give most of the architectural archive, over 20,000 documents that eventually composed the Mies van der Rohe Archive, formally established in 1968 –the only architectural archive at MoMA, since the rest of the architectural collection is composed of a selection of documents to represent a wide number of designers. MoMA’s decision has conferred to the Mies Archive an exceptional status

1 For a detailed discussion of the dispersal of materials, see the first chapter of Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristián Cirici, and Fernando Ramos, Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona Pavilion. (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1993), particularly pages 20-21.

2 The fate of Mies’ archive is described in detail in Frank Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985): 318-320.

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The Mies van der Rohe Archive, Department of Architecture and Design. The Museum of Modern art, New York.

in the world of architectural collections, the only one to be kept –in isolation– in such an institution. The Archive, therefore, not only preserves the memory and origins of Mies’ work, but also acts as a place of authority –a true domicile of crucial documents, an arkheîon of Modern design.3

The lack of access to Mies’ European archive sparked several efforts to reproduce some of the documents. In 1965, Werner Blaser produced a set of new drawings in collaboration with Mies himself and his studio, published as Mies van der Rohe: the Art of the Structure. 4 Since the end of World War II, Sergius Ruegenberg, a former collaborator of Mies in Berlin, worked for years on redrawing the Barcelona Pavilion. These documents, together with other drawn versions, and the extensive literature that accumulated on the Pavilion, became the basis for the impulse to rebuild it. Moreover, the Pavilion was presented in a monographic exhibition at MoMA in 1979, curated by Ludwig Glaeser, who had been responsible for the Mies Archive since its creation until 1980, under Arthur Drexler as head of the Departament of Architecture and Design. Even though interest in rebuilding the Pavilion dated as far back as 1959, when Oriol Bohigas wrote a formal letter to Mies seeking his approval for such a project, the concrete decision took place in 1981, shortly after the presentation of Glaeser’s exhibit in Barcelona.5

For decades, the Barcelona Pavilion exerted its influence from a paper condition, from the archival crate in Mühlhausen. Its reconstruction, from 1982 to 1986, was also propelled by another, very extensive set of documents --the virtual archive of writings, documents and graphic reproductions of the pavilion that have been produced and circulated during the previous decades.

3 The Archive at MoMA has been published by Arthur Drexler and Frank Schulze, The Mies van der Rohe Archive. (New York: Garland, 1986). The meaning of arkheîon as an architectural space is described in detail in the initial chapter of Jacques Derrida’s Mal d’archive (Paris, 1995).4 Werner Blaser, Mies van der Rohe: the Art of the Structure (Buenos Aires: Carlos Hirsch, 1965).5 The 1979 exhibit travelled extensively through the United States and Europe, including Barcelona. The catalogue is Ludwig Glaeser’s Ludwig Mies van der

Rohe: The Barcelona Pavilion’s 50th Anniversary. New York : The Museum of Modern Art, 1979.

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Muntadas. About 405 East 13 Street (1973)

2. On Translation: Paper BP/ mVDRStarting in the early 1970s, Muntadas worked on a series of projects described as sensorial experiences that were based on an exploration of the senses of smell, touch and taste, and were then recorded in film, videotape, or through other means.6 One of them, of particular relevance for the project On Translation: Paper BP MVDR, is the olfactory proposal for About 405 East 13th Street.

In 1973, Jean Dupuy invited thirty-four artists to participate in the exhibit. The aim of this collective project titled About 405 East 13th Street. was to intervene, modify or document the interior and exterior spaces of Dupuy’s loft –following a process that he termed as “spatialisation”. In critic Laurie Anderson’s words, it explored the “description and manipulation of several interior, exterior, and interfacial aspects of the loft. The microscopic and telescopic realignments destabilized the conventional subject-object relationship.”7 As an example, Gordon Matta-Clark, one of the invited artists, proposed to simply clean one of several window’s pane of glass, thus subtly modifying the relationship between interior and exterior spaces, a gesture that ensured the introduction of light.

For this same project, Muntadas introduced a standard vertical file cabinet with four drawers, each covered with a photograph of a shopfront in the neighbourhood:

“May first 1973, I trought all area between 11th and 14th streets and First and “A’ Avenues. Four spots were considered as characteristic because of their particular smells. These four locations show an itinerary and describe the environment that surrounds 405 East 13th Street.”

The file cabinet included four items, each taken from one of the chosen sites, each with an unmistakable smell –herrings from the foodstore, old books and papers from a second-hand bookstore, candles and incense from a church-shop, and leather products from a shoe repair. Therefore, the spatial itinerary through a section of the city was recorded and reorganized in the file cabinet as an archival gesture to represent spatial perception through four sensorial elements. The smell thus acted as the vehicle to evoke an absent experience that conditioned one’s occupation of space.

6 Mary Anne Staniszewski. “An Interpretation/Translation of Muntadas’ Projects”. In Muntadas: On Translation. M. Dávila and V. Roma, eds. Barcelona: Actar-Macba, 2002.

7 Laurie Anderson, “About 405 # 1” In Art Forum (September 1973).

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Muntadas. About 405 East 13 Street (1973)

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Even though this was an early project, we find the impulse that later, starting in 1995, has developed into an extensive series of projects under the general title On Translation, investigating the extent to which original manifestations and their translations need each other, cannot be understood without their mutual reference.

Muntadas’ project for the Pavilion, ON TRANSLATION/ PAPER (BP/MVDR) introduces the invisibility of the archive through its olfactory presence –the archive, as well as all the documents about the project, propelled by the project. Within the enclosed space, next to the translucent wall, three small fileboxes index them –including the extensive bibliography, images of the MoMA Archive, the many publications, as sold in any bookstore, even at the Pavilion’s. It could even include, if only available, the documents that were produced –signed– in the Pavilion itself in 1929.

The preliminary research led Muntadas to consider a double reference –the Barcelona Pavilion together with the Rosa Luxemburg monument, commissioned to Mies by the communist party in 1926. The permanent memorial in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde cemetery was destroyed seven years later by the Nazis, whereas the ephemeral pavilion has become permanent in its 1986 reconstruction. The questions about temporality and permanence instigated by these two projects are therefore at the basis of Muntadas’ intervention in the Pavilion –in his own words, “The archived memory of the Pavilion, together with the fact of its long existence in relation to paper and to printed documentation drove me again towards the perception of smell in relation to time, to the archive, to enclosed space, and to olfactive experience”.8

In this case, there is a reciprocal dependance between the built structure and its other, paper-based condition –its memory as embodied by the archive, in its multiple publications and documents. Muntadas’ intervention makes sensible the other Pavilion –invisible yet perceptible in the olfactory experience of printed, stored paper.

The glass structure thus acts as a bottling device, the recipient that keeps the invisibility of the odour, the evocation of what is absent during our visit to the Pavilion, yet it has managed to propel and shape our interest, our perception of those spaces and materials. The commanding smell of the archive evidences the ephemeral condition of the marble slabs and the steel columns.

8 From some preliminary notes on the project by Muntadas.

Muntadas. About 405 East 13 Street (1973)

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Beatriz Colomina

The Smellof mies

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When Mies had the first retrospective exhibition of his work in 1947, curated by Philip Johnson in the Museum of Modern Art, floor to ceiling photomurals, models, and sculptural furniture pieces floated in a square room, redefining the space. Charles Eames, sent by the magazine Arts & Architecture to photograph the exhibition, was at first disappointed because he didn’t see anything new in the projects that were exhibited but on second take he was impressed by Mies’s design of the exhibition itself. The exhibition was significant, according to him, not because of the individual exhibits, but because of the way Mies had organized them. When Eames published his photographs of the Mies exhibition in Arts & Architecture, he wrote: “The significant thing seems to be the way in which he [Mies] has taken documents of his architecture and furniture and used them as elements in creating a space that says, “this is what it’s all about.”1 Eames was very impressed by the zooming and overlapping of scales: a huge photomural of a small pencil sketch alongside a chair towering over a model next to a twice-life-size photograph, and so on. He also noted the interaction between the perspective of the room and that of the life-sized photographs. The visitor experiences Mies’s architecture, rather than a representation of it, by walking through the display and watching others move. It is a sensual encounter: “The exhibition itself provides the smell and feel of what makes it, and Mies van der Rohe great.”2 Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4

But what is this smell in the always clean, antiseptic, white spaces of MoMA? How do you smell an architect and his work in a gallery? What kind of nose does Eames have that it can pick up such things? Or is it that this is not simply an exhibition of Mies’s work but the work itself right there in the room, palpable, sensual, generating the very feelings that are specific to the work–even allowing us to smell the architect as if the very body of Mies has infused the exhibition, as if he was still lingering in the room? How then can the bodily presence of an architect be felt in an array of photographs?

Mies is usually treated as an almost emblematically abstract architect, the stern guardian of precise geometries, caretaker of a certain cleanliness of form and line while the role of material sensuality is assigned to his partner Lilly Reich. When Reich was finally given her own retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 1966, the smell of the linoleum leaked out from the gallery in the depths of the building to greet the visitors as they enter the museum lobby. What Eames smells is something different. What he is so astutely detecting is that the documentation of Mies’s work is not a secondary representation or record of the work but it is the work itself. The smell of Mies is the smell of documents. The MoMA exhibition was made up entirely of “documents,” as Eames put it. The visitor is invited to enter an archive, maneuvering between documents in exactly the same way as the inhabitants of Mies’s buildings are invited to

1 Charles Eames, “Mies van der Rohe,” photographs by Charles Eames taken at the exhibition, Arts & Architecture (December 1947) p. 27.2 Ibid.

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maneuver around suspended images that lightly defined a space. The exhibition is simply an expansion of the archive, making physical the space of documentation.

Archives always have a smell lingering between the documents and the space that contains them. But in Mies’s case, it is the documents themselves that form the space. They are suspended in public, dispersed and floating as partitions that barely define a space. This is an archive that does not come out of a closed room but out of the open space of publication. The smell of the Mies’s archive is the smell of publications. Think, for example, about the Barcelona Pavilion, which is widely understood today as the most influential building of the twentieth century but it was in fact seen by “nobody.” Despite its prominent location in the layout of the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona, even journalists sent by professional architectural magazines passed it over entirely, unable to detect its significance. Local journalists provided testimony to its existence. They commented on the “mysterious” effect, “because a person standing in front of one of these glass walls sees himself reflected as if by a mirror, but if he moves behind them, he then sees the exterior perfectly. Not all the visitors notice this curious particularity whose cause remains ignored.”3 It is necessary to go back to these kinds of statements to understand the surprise that a glass building produced in 1929, something that, as Alison Smithson put it, a generation that has grown up around Hilton International hotels may have difficulty imagining.

It was only in the 1950s, precisely in the aftermath of the 1947 Mies exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, that the

1,2,3. Charles Eames’ photographs of Mies van der Rohe exhibition at MoMA, 1947. From: Arts and Architecture December 1947.

3 Local journalist from Barcelona reviewing the pavilion. Quoted in J. Quetglas, “Fear of Glass: The Barcelona Pavilion,” Revisions 2, guest-edited by Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 130.

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4. Mies van der Rohe, Plan of the exhibition Mies van der Rohe at MoMA, 1947. From: Arts and Architecture December 1947.

pavilion burst into every architectural publication.4 As glass architecture became dominant, the pavilion was hailed as the most beautiful building of the century, exemplifying the cult of transparency. A building that was known only through magazine images (it was dismantled at the closing of the exhibition in Barcelona and its fragments misplaced during its return trip to Germany) became the most significant monument of modern architecture.

What is crucial about the Barcelona Pavilion is that it was both real, a one-to-one construction that existed for a time, and an image, a media construction. All we knew about it, before its reconstruction in 1986, were the photographs. It lived in the photographs.

If temporary buildings like the Barcelona Pavilion had their full force as images, some images have the full force of buildings. Think of Mies’s famous project of the Glass Skyscraper of 1922, where the model is made to look like a building that has already been constructed, with light, reflections, greenery and adjacent existing buildings. Fig. 5 He photographs it so as to give the impression that the building is living, which means removing all traces of it being a model, carefully blurring the line between the object and its background.

He had done the same thing with drawing in the earlier version of the project, his entry into the Friedrichstrasse competition of 1921, where he tried to produce the effect that the building already existed, photomontaging a rendering of the building onto a photograph of the street with cars, and electrical cables, and refining the design in a series of photomontages that culminated in a canonical rendering. Fig. 6, 7 It is important to note that these images are large, so large that you find yourself in the street when looking at them, going into the image. The viewer of the photomontage experiences the space of the street, then, as it were, comes across the new building at the end. These drawings and models were not simply documents of projects to be built. In fact, Mies couldn’t have built any of them at the time, even if given the opportunity. He didn’t have the knowledge, the technical expertise, yet. In fact, Mies’s place in architectural history, his role as one of the so-called fathers of the modern movement, was established through a series of five projects, none of them actually built (or even buildable–they were not developed at that level), that he made public through exhibitions and publications during the first half of the 1920s: the two Glass Skyscrapers of 1921 and 1922, the Reinforced Concrete Office Building of 1923 and the Concrete and Brick Country Houses of 1923 and 1924. The projects were exhibited and published in a long list of journals, avant-

4 For the reception of the Barcelona Pavilion, see Juan Pablo Bonta, Architecture and its Interpretation: A Study of Expressive Systems in Architecture (New York: Rizzoli International, 1979), 131–74.

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garde and professional, such as Frühlicht, G, the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, Merz, Wasmuths Monatshefte fur Baukunst, L’Architecture Vivante and so on and included in many books on modern architecture written during the 1920s, including Walter Gropius’s Internationale Architektur (1925), Gustav Platz’s Die Baukunst der neusten Zeit (1927), and Walter Curt Behrendt’s Der Sieg des neuen Baustils (1927).

Mies’s first writings were also produced in relation to these projects. His first article, “Hochhäusser,” (“Skyscrapers”) was published in Frühlicht. Here, on the occasion of the Friedrichstrasse competition, Mies writes an article on high buildings, to accompany the two versions of his glass skyscrapers Figs. 6, 7 that states: “The structural concept is the essential foundation of the artistic design...” But, as Wolf Tegethoff has pointed out, “neither the Friedrichstrasse plan nor the published version of the curvilinear plan gives any indication whatever of the structural system.”5 Nevertheless, these plans and photographs would appear in the long list of journals both German and foreign, both avant-garde and professional, even if some of the professional journals use the illustrations to massacre the building from a technical point of view, as when the Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1923 calls Mies’s Glass Skyscraper, “Nude Building falling down stairs.” Mies’s subsequent articles were again written to accompany his projects: “Bürohaus” was published in the first issue of G together with the Concrete Office Building, and “Bauen” (“Building”) written with Hans Richter, the editor of G, appeared framing the Concrete Country House in the second issue. Mies wrote a total of seven articles in these years contributing significantly to the making of his persona.

It was also around 1920 that Mies changed his name to Miës van der Rohe, adding his mother’s family name “Rohe” to his own with the Dutch preposition “van.” According to Sandra Honey, “things Dutch ran high in Germany at the time.” Other critics have suggested that he was hoping it would ring close to “von,” with its aristocratic overtones. He even added the umlaut to the “e” of Mies, so that the word would be pronounced in two syllables. “Mies” in German means “awkward, nasty, miserable, poor, seedy, out of sorts, bad or wretched.”6 He clearly did not want any of these attributes associated with his work. Every aspect of his life, work, self-presentation and theorization was reconstructed during the years of the five experimental projects.

5. Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper Project, 1922. Model. From: David Spaeth, Mies Van der Rohe (NY: Rizzoli, 1985) p. 37

5 Wolf Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity,” Mies van der Rohe, Critical Essays, ed. by Franz Schulze (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 43.

6 Sandra Honey, “Mies in Germany,” Mies van der Rohe: European Works, p. 14 and 25 (note 14). David Spaeth, “Ludwig Mies van de Rohe: A Biographical Essay,” Mies Reconsidered: His Career, Legacy and Dsiciples (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago and New York: Rizzoli, 1986), p. 15.

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It was these five projects, these five paper architectures, together with the publicity apparatus enveloping them, that first made Mies into a historical figure. The projects that he had built so far (and that he would continue to develop during the same years) would have taken him nowhere. Sure, the Riehl house of 1907 was already noted by a critic, some historians may object. And, indeed, the house was published in Moderne Bauformen and in Innen Dekoration. But between the somewhat modest articles covering this house in 1910 and his own article in G in 1921, presenting the glass skyscraper, nothing else of Mies’s work was published.

Should we attribute this silence to the blindness of architectural critics of his time, as some historians seem to imply? Here again Mies’s attitude is clear. In the early 1920s he destroyed the drawings of most of his work prior to that time, thereby constructing a very precise “image” of himself, one from which all incoherences, all faux-pas, were erased.7 And still in 1947 Mies did not allow Philip Johnson to publish most of his early work in the monograph that Johnson was preparing as catalogue of the exhibition at MoMA and that would constitute the first book on Mies. “Not enough of a statement,” Mies is supposed to have said about the drawings of some early project that Johnson wanted to include.8 And when, thirty years later, Johnson is asked in an interview, “how would you do the book today?” he answers: “Most of all I would look into ... the suddenness with which Mies went from what he had been doing to the glass skyscraper of 1921,”9 and he utters something about “Expressionism, the feeling of a defeated Berlin, the character of the Novembergruppe,” and other –to my ear– lateral issues.

A far more convincing clue to Mies’s sudden change of direction was provided by Sandra Honey when she wrote that the breaking point came when Walter Gropius refused to exhibit Mies’s project for the Kröller-Müller house in his 1919 Exhibition for Unknown Architects (Austellung fur Unbekamte Architekten).10 According to Mies, Gropius said: “We can’t exhibit it, we are looking for something completely different.”11 The failure of this house, a project that

7. Mies van der Rohe, Competition for Glass Skyscraper, Friedrichs-trasse, Berlin, frst project: photomontage with pencil and charcoal drawings, 1921/22. From: Mies in America, p. 207.

6. Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project, Berlin, 1921. Perspective view from north. Photomontage. (140 x 100 cm)From: Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, eds., Mies in Berlin, (New York: MoMA 2001), p. 181. Copyright: Bauhaus Archiv Berlin

7 “At some point in late 1925 or early 1926, Mies directed his assistant Sergius Ruegenberg to climb to the attic of his studio at Am Karlsbad 24 and destroy all the old plans and drawings that had been stored there.” Wolf Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity,” Mies van der Rohe, Critical Essays, p. 33.

8 Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe, 3rd ed. (New Yor: the Museum of Modern Art, 1978), p. 208. 9 Ibidem, p.211.10 The exhibition was organized by Gropius for the Arbeitrat für Kunst. Sandra Honey, “Who and What Inspired Mies van der Rohe in Germany,” 11 Mies van der Rohe in an interview with Ulrich Conrads, Berlin 1966 (recorded on a L.P. album, “Mies in Berlin,” Bauwelt Archiv 1. Quoted by Sandra

Honey, “Mies in Germany,” Mies van der Rohe: European Works, p. 16. Architectural Design 3/4, 1979, p. 99; and “Mies in Germany,” Mies van der Rohe: European Works, p. 16.

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Mies was so attached to as to still include it in the MoMA exhibition, or the trauma of that rejection, stimulated a major change in his work. Excluded from an exhibition dedicated to an emergent sensibility, he started designing directly for exhibitions and in so doing, revolutionized his work. The competitions, exhibitions and publication of the early 1920s did not simply give Mies the opportunity to present his first modern projects. The projects were modern precisely because they were produced for those contexts. The exhibition became the site of his laboratory.

Mies’s work is a text book case of a wider phenomenon. Modern architecture became “modern” not as it is usually understood by using glass, steel, or reinforced concrete, but by engaging with the media: with publications, competitions, exhibitions. With Mies this is literally the case. What had been a series of rather conservative projects realized for “real” clients (the Riehl house, the Perls house, the Kröller-Müller house, the Urbig house) became in the context of the Friedrichstrasse competition, of G, of Fruhlicht and so on, a series of manifestos of modern architecture.

Not only that, but in Mies you can see, perhaps as in no other architect of the modern movement, a true case of schizophrenia between his “published” projects and those developed for his clients. Still in the 1920s, at the same time that he was developing his most radical projects, Mies could build such conservative houses as the Villa Eichstaedt in a suburb of Berlin (1922) Fig. 8 and the villa Mosler in Potsdam (1924). Fig. 9 Can we blame these projects on the conservative taste of Mies’s clients? Once again, not so easily. Mosler was a banker and his house is said to reflect his taste. But when in 1924 the art historian and constructivist artist, Walter Dexel, who was very much interested in and supportive of modern architecture, commissioned Mies to do a house for him, Mies blew it. He was unable to come up with the modern house his client had desired. He gave one excuse after another. The deadline was repeatedly postponed. And in the end Dexel gave the project to another architect.12 It was precisely the very knowledge of traditional construction, which his critics now worship, that got in Mies’s way. In fact, it was not until 1927 that he was able to break with tradition, when he managed to put up non-load-bearing walls in his apartment building at the Weissenhof Siedlung. For a long time, then, there was an enormous gap between the flowing architecture of Mies’s published projects and his struggle to find the appropriate techniques to produce these effects

8. Mies van der Rohe, Eichstädt House, Berlin-Nikolassee, 1921-23.

9. Mies van der Rohe, Mosler House, Postdam-Neubabelsberg, 1924-26.

12 Wolf Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity,” Mies van der Rohe, Critical Essays, pp. 57-58.

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in built form. For many years he was literally trying to catch up with his publications. Perhaps that is why he worked so hard to produce a sense of realism in the representation of his projects, as, for example, in the photomontage of the Glass Skyscraper with cars flying by on the Friedrichstrasse. Fig 10

Mies photographed the model to give the illusion that it could be built–perhaps even to convince himself that he could build it. In fact, one could argue that he did build it. The image is the project. In the imagination of architects the world over, the Friedrichstrasse skyscraper was built and was responded to by countless other projects. The documents created a palpable physical sense of a new architecture. Which is not to say that they precisely showed what the building would be. On the contrary, they communicated the atmosphere of those buildings, the smell of modernity. And when such buildings were built, by Mies or others, they were actually built as documents in the street–absorbing and regenerating the smell of Mies’s archive.

If modern architecture is produced within the space of publications, photographs, exhibitions, etc, this space is for the most part two-dimensional, and at a certain point architecture somehow internalizes that space, that flatness. In Mies you can start seeing that with the Barcelona Pavilion, the Tugendhat house, the house for a bachelor, and other projects. Traditionally Mies’s architecture is described in terms of flowing, three-dimensional space, but in fact the spatial experience is organized by two-dimensional frames. The space is not simply contained by the walls in a geometric sense. Rather, the space is exuding from the suspended images. To enter the space is not to enter a volume but simply to approach the documents. All the elements of Mies’s buildings are very precisely defined so that their effect can elude definition. Architecture leaks out of the documents, it circulates and dissipates.

10. Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper Project, 1922. Photomontage. From: Detlef Mertins, The Presence of Mies, (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994 p. 57. Copyright: Berlinische Galerie, Museum fur Moderne. Kunst Photographie und Architektur, Berlin, and VG Bild-Kunst.

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marco De michelis

The Smellsof History

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No one can say that fortune did not smile on the Barcelona Pavilion from the very outset.

Mies van der Rohe had been given the commission at the beginning of July 1928 and by the end of preliminary discussions that went on until October he had little more than six months to conceive and construct the little building: an exceptionally short time for an architect as “slow” as Mies was.

The Pavilion, as is well known, never hosted any particular exhibition, but it was cleverly positioned by its architect on the main route to one of the World Fair’s major attractions, the Pueblo Español composite “Spanish town”. As a result it could be taken as a pleasant stop along the way, and was passed through by throngs of visitors before they resumed their journey.

At the end of January 1930 the gates of the Barcelona International Exposition, which had opened on May 19 of the previous year, finally closed, and the Pavilion was dismantled, as planned, after little more than six months of existence. Its memory was preserved in the chronicles of the Catalan exposition that appeared in the German press,1 and also in international magazines.2 If such testimonies were few in number –to be counted on the fingers of one hand– they were generally favourable. And the fond memories had not yet faded in 1932, when the very able conservative architect Paul Bonatz praised the Pavilion as “the most beautiful encounter between sculpture and architecture”; two years earlier Fritz Tamms had included two illustrations of it in a long essay on “Architektur und Plastik”.3 From the 1930s on, almost all of the early surveys of the new architecture of the twentieth century, both in Europe and in America, featured a black and white photograph of the Pavilion, chosen from the pictures of the International Exposition taken by a Berlin news agency.

In 1947, the small pool with the sculpture “Morning” by Georg Kolbe was selected for the cover of the monograph by Philip Johnson accompanying the first one-man exhibition by the German architect at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From that time on the few original black and white photographs constituted almost the only documents on

1 Justus Bier, “Mies van der Rohes Reichspavillon in Barcelona’, in Die Form, 1929, No. 16, pp. 423-430; Hans Bernoulli, “Der Pavillon des Deutschen Rei-ches und der Internationalen Ausstellung, Barcelona’, in Werk, November 1929, pp. 350-351; Walther Genzmer, “Die Internationale Ausstellung in Barce-lona’, in Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, 1929, No. 34, pp. 541-546; idem, “Der Deutsche Reichspavillon auf der Internationalen Ausstellung, Barcelona’, in Die Baugilde, 1929, pp. 1654-1657; Guido Harbers, “Deutsche Reichspavillon in Barcelona auf der Internationalen Austellung’, in Der Baumeister, 1929, pp. 421-427.

2 Helen Appleton Read, “Germany at the Barcelona World’s Fair’, in Art, October 1929, pp. 112-113; William F. Paris, “The Barcelona Exposition. A splendid but costly effort of the Catalan people’, in The Architectural Forum, November 1929, No. 5, pp. 481-496.

3 Paul Bonatz, “Ein Baumeister spricht über die Bauplastik’, in Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, 1932, No. 8, p. 378; Fritz Tamms, “Architektur und Plastik’, in Die Baugilde, May 1930, p. 792-809.

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which the myth and the “authority” of Mies’s masterpiece were founded:4 documents that, as with any photographed architecture, are anything but objective and all the more tendentious in this case, precisely because the complex play of reflections and mirrorings had obliged the photographers to do a lot of retouching and correcting. In particular, the perception of the scale of the building is considerably altered in photographs, in so far as these suggest that the statue by Kolbe is “natural’ in its dimensions when in fact it was far larger than life-size.

In the 1960s the Mies Pavilion was almost universally regarded –by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, through to Peter Blake and Nikolaus Pevsner– as one of the finest achievements of modern architecture, without any additional information being available, beyond the aforementioned press agency photographs from 1929, when the crowds of visitors to the Barcelona Exposition had the unique opportunity of walking round the actual Pavilion, though the vast majority can scarcely have imagined the remarkable significance of the little building.

It was more than fifty years later, between 1984 and 1986, that the Pavilion was rebuilt on the original site, this time as a permanent structure: more than re-built it was built from scratch, in an attempt to reinterpret its original physiognomy in terms of a permanent building. Rem Koolhaas has commented on the nature of this reconstruction and, in particular, on the “discovery” of its original colours as an unmitigated “destruction of its aura”.

The real scandal, in reality, was the replacing of black and white with a vibrant chromaticity, in effect casting doubt on the whole issue of the immaculate whiteness of modern architecture. And I see it as no accident that the “rebuilt” Pavilion, its “double”, should have aroused such an unusual amount of interest not only among architects and people involved with architecture but also, in recent years, among artists and photographers: Fischli & Weiss, Günther Förg, Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, to mention a few. All of these artists have sought to represent the extraordinary optical mechanism created by Mies van der Rohe, its reflections and transparencies, the gleaming chromed metal of the door- and window frames and the cruciform-sectioned columns, the black carpet, the red curtains and the golden and grey-green tones of the marble.

It is strange: to photograph again, half a century later, a building that had survived only in a few photographs, and be unable to find the smallest trace of the time that has elapsed, the wear and tear wrought by the passing of the years, the footsteps of the visitors, dust gathering in out-of-the-way corners, rust eating away at the chrome surfaces. Indeed: the colours, having transcended dichromaticism, shine for the first time with an intensity that is probably –though it is impossible to prove this–similar to that of the original, merging in the reflections and transparencies.

The rules of restoration and conservation prohibit such reconstructions. That said, in this case the reconstruction project has been an instrument of knowledge and constituted a critical dilemma powerful enough to justify any betrayal of orthodoxy. Not only that: much more than the photographic representations of the original, it is the physical experience of the space –even of the false space of the almost perfect imitation– that alone can enable us to understand how Mies van der Rohe managed to configure in this masterpiece of his that idea of the modern space that, from Gottfried Semper on, had been the most complex and the most distinctive goal and aspiration of modernity. In this space, Mies’s cruciform columns serve as the figures deployed in the foreground against which the gaze stumbles, while the walls –now walls of glass and shining marble– constitute the background on which the eye strives to recapture precisely that lost balance.

4 Thomas Pavel, “The Barcelona Pavilion as a Media Event’, in U. Berger & Th. Pavel (eds.), Barcelona-Pavilion. Mies van der Rohe & Kolbe. Architecture & Sculpture, Berlin, Jovis (catalogue of the exhibition, Berlin, Kolbe Museum), 2006, pp. 52-71.

5 Rem Koolhaas, “Miesverstaendnisse’, in Arch+, June 2002, No. 161, pp. 78-83.

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The space, as Marco Pogačnik has noted in a formidable text on Mies,6 “is broken and recomposed here surprisingly successfully […] artificial light and natural light create planes that meet at virtual depths, the column itself that takes on an almost ghost-like appearance, deprived as it is of a base and an upper end”.

A building that is nothing other than the memory of itself, nothing other than the representation of a past memory, but in which the traces of time have been replaced by the changing splendour of the present, could never be a matter of indifference to an artist like Muntadas, whose investigations in the phenomenology of human feelings have been going on now since the early 1970s, living more and more in the glass buildings, the transparent and insubstantial spaces of railway stations, airports and shopping centres.

What can the artist today add to the resplendent beauty of a masterpiece in order to suggest a hidden aporia? To reveal the uniqueness of its character, but also a void, an absence that leaves its meaning precarious?

Time leaves traces of its passage, those traces that modern materials like steel and glass tend to render barely visible, as Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch remarked many years ago: in those modernist houses it was “difficult” to leave a trace, but not impossible. The traces were barely visible, but they were there. In the Mies Pavilion, the interruption of time, the long interval in which the work itself in its physicality had vanished, surviving only as an image, had erased the traces to the extent that the reconstructed work seems more “real” than its true representation in the period photographs.

Among those is the experience of space made possible again today; the only point of connection are the papers, the documents, the preliminary sketches, the repeated attempts to find the definitive solution, the accounts of journalists and visitors, the newspaper clippings, the incomplete fragments of the whole thing, from the first day of receiving the commission down to the most distressing days of the closing of the Exposition and the dismantling of its abandoned structures.

There is no dust on the walls and in forgotten corners. No cracked surfaces and broken edges. No little scars made by countless bumps. No stains that bear witness to damage repaired too late. There are no messages scored into the plaster of hidden walls.

This story does not have the smell of burnt gasoline of the big city pulsing with life. It has none of the smells bound up with the seasons and the natural cycles of the countryside. It does not have the noxious reminders of manufacturing and dumping too close to residential areas, the smells of paint and lime of the construction sites7. We cannot discern any memories accumulated over the course of a family’s life.

The Mies Pavilion has no traces and no smell.

Or rather: the smell that attaches to it is that of its own interrupted story, of the papers, documents or reports that recount what happened. The two stages of its story, so distant and so different, can only be rejoined by following the slender thread of the documents that enable us to tell it again today.

6 Marco Pogacnik, “Mies van der Rohe et les metamorphoses de l’ordre”, in Roberto Gargiani (a cura di), La colonne. Nouvelle histoire de la construc-tion, Lausanne, Presses polytechniques e universitaires romaindes, 2008, pp. 434-453.

7 Cfr. Scent of the City, Mirko Zardini ed., exhibition catalogue, Canadian Centre of Architecture, Montreal, 2006.

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Antoni Muntadas was born in Barcelona in 1942 and lives in New York since 1971. Through his works he addresses social, political and communications issues such as the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and investigates channels of information and the ways they may be used to censor or promulgate ideas. His projects are presented in different media such as photography, video, publications, the Internet, installations and urban interventions.Muntadas has taught and directed seminars at diverse institutions throughout Europe and the United States, including the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, the Fine Arts Schools in Bordeaux and Grenoble, the University of California in San Diego, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Cooper Union in New York, the University of São Paulo, and the University of Buenos Aires. He has also been welcomed as a resident artist and consulting advisor by various research and education centres including the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, the Banff Centre in Alberta, Arteleku in San Sebastian, The National Studio for Contemporary Arts Le Fresnoy, and the University of Western Sydney. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Visual Arts Program in the School of Architecture at the MIT in Cambridge and the Instituto Universitario de Arquitectura del Veneto in Venice.

Muntadas has received several prizes and grants, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Arts Electronica in Linz, Laser díOr in Locarno, and the Premi Nacional díArts Plàstiques awarded by the Catalan Government. One of his most recent awards is the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas for the year 2005 granted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture.

His work has been exhibited in numerous museums, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, the Musée Contemporain de Montreal, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro and the Museu díArt Contemporani de Barcelona, while other international events in which he has presented work are the VI and X editions of Documenta Kassel (1977, 1997), the Whitney Biennial of American Art (1991), the 51st Venice Biennial (2005) and those in São Paulo, Lyon, Taipei, Gwangju and Havana.

Subsequently to On Translation: I Giardini displayed at the Spanish Pavilion in the last edition of the Venice biennial, his latest solo exhibitions include Protokolle, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Muntadas. Proyectos Urbanos (2002/2005)Ö Hacia Sevilla 2008, Centro de las Artes de Sevilla and Muntadas. Histoires du couteau, Le Creux de líenfer, Centre díart contemporain, Thiers. In 2006 he presented the installation On Translation: SocialNetworks at the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts in San José, California, a two-year public project realized in collaboration with students of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at the San José State University, and in 2007 exhibited Muntadas/BS. AS. simultaneously at the Telefónica Foundation Space, the Recoleta Cultural Center and the Spanish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires. In 2008 he has presented Petit et Grand at the Cervantes Institute in Paris and Muntadas: The Construction of Fear and the Loss of Public Space at the José Guerrero Cultural Centre in Granada.

Intervention credits

CuratorXavier Costa

CoordinatorIvan Blasi

Acknowledgments:Ernesto VentósDarío SirerolCristina AgàpitoPilar CarbonellAndrea NacachDepartment of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkBarry BergdollAndres LepikPaul GallowayJason Pearson

Publication credits

EditorXavier Costa

CoordinatorIvan Blasi

TranslationRichard Rees

Graphic DesignPG associats SL

Impressió Ingoprint

© texts: their authors

ProductionActar

Photographic CreditsAntoni MuntadasIvan Blasi

Fundació Mies van der Rohe

DirectorLluís Hortet

Board of TrusteesAjuntament de BarcelonaMinisterio de ViviendaDepartament de Política Territorial i Obres Públiques de la Generalitat de CatalunyaEl Consorci de la Zona Franca de BarcelonaFira de BarcelonaCol.legi d’Arquitectes de CatalunyaEscola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de BarcelonaThe Museum of Modern Art, New YorkStiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin

Amb el patrocini de

Amb la col.laboració de

MUNTADAS On Translation: PAPER/ BP MVDR