There was once an empty site

Abstract

This article unveils and discusses a series of unknown photographs of the empty site in which Mies and Lilly Reich's 1929 German Pavilion in Barcelona had been built and dismantled, and shot by Ludwig Glaeser, curator of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at MoMA in 1979. It suggests that more than the manifestation of a desire to rematerialise the building through the agency of photography, Glaeser's photographs are, photographs of dust, but more importantly, a manifestation of the possibility of re-enacting the widely known 1929 Berliner Bild-Bericht photographs.