Sobre arquitectura (en el pabellón de Barcelona). La exposición como forma de investigación

Abstract

Mies van der Rohe was thinking about architecture when in 1929 he designed the German Pavilion for the Barcelona World’s Fair, a building that set out to portray the new Weimar Republic. Without a programme as such, and with hardly any time, its ultimate purpose was to showcase itself as the culmination of a previously dormant research project studying a series of exhibition stands for German industry. It was a temporary museum for a new genre of architecture that depicted the myth of “permanent void” once it was disassembled, with fourteen images considered as examples of a new spatial arrangement. Barcelona City Council was thinking about architecture when it decided to reconstruct the Pavilion in the 1980s, while each year a call is made out to architects and artists to think about architecture by holding a series of temporary installations, highlighting the paradoxical value of the exhibited exhibitor and the (in)visible void ABOUT the key characteristics that (un)define it.