German Pavilion Research Articles

THE PHYSICAL MODEL FOR THE IL PAVILION AND THE USAGE OF ITS DIGITAL TWIN

The so-called IL pavilion in Stuttgart, constructed by Frei Otto and the Institute for Lightweight Structures (IL) served itself as an experimental building for testing the execution of a new type of cable net construction. At this 1:1 mock-up various manufacturing techniques and measuring methods were tested, additionally to model tests on physical models. These models were necessary, because at that time no adequate calculation methods were available to design the complex geometries of such wide-span cable net constructions. In this paper, the authors clarify the way the model was produced, the development of the measurement methods and the impact of model testing for the execution of the innovative construction of the German pavilion for the World's Fair in Montréal in 1967. The physical model, which is one of the few surviving measurement models from this period, was digitally rebuilt with state of the arts methods in the context of the DFG research project “last witnesses”. The data extracted from the physical model was compared with a model generated from the original cut stencils. Overall, the numbers match fairly well, nevertheless there are some outliers due to the changed numbers of elements, which have a deviation of more than 40%. The data extracted from the digital twin will further be used to evaluate changed boundary conditions, increased snow loads or wind effects for the building itself and to record the actual state of the model for future preservation measures.

THE PHYSICAL MODEL FOR THE IL PAVILION AND THE USAGE OF ITS DIGITAL TWIN

The so-called IL pavilion in Stuttgart, constructed by Frei Otto and the Institute for Lightweight Structures (IL) served itself as an experimental building for testing the execution of a new type of cable net construction. At this 1:1 mock-up various manufacturing techniques and measuring methods were tested, additionally to model tests on physical models. These models were necessary, because at that time no adequate calculation methods were available to design the complex geometries of such wide-span cable net constructions. In this paper, the authors clarify the way the model was produced, the development of the measurement methods and the impact of model testing for the execution of the innovative construction of the German pavilion for the World's Fair in Montréal in 1967. The physical model, which is one of the few surviving measurement models from this period, was digitally rebuilt with state of the arts methods in the context of the DFG research project “last witnesses”. The data extracted from the physical model was compared with a model generated from the original cut stencils. Overall, the numbers match fairly well, nevertheless there are some outliers due to the changed numbers of elements, which have a deviation of more than 40%. The data extracted from the digital twin will further be used to evaluate changed boundary conditions, increased snow loads or wind effects for the building itself and to record the actual state of the model for future preservation measures.

Fragile Visions of the Social: Rethinking Solidarity with the Performance Piece Faust and the TV-series Skam

The paper explores the portrayal of social relations among youth in the popular Norwegian TV-series Skam and places this analysis in relation to Anne Imhof’s award-winning performance piece Faust, which received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the German Pavilion. As expressions of how today’s youth experience social relations under the conditions of late capitalism, I examine the way in which the TV-series and the performance work respectively explore when and how ‘we’ is shaped. I argue that they provide particular insight into the limits and possibilities for the formation of relations of solidarity today.

L'ARCHITETTURA DI MIES VAN DER ROHE, FRA KANDINSKIJ E EJZENŠTEJN. UNA POSSIBILE RILETTURA DEL PADIGLIONE DI BARCELLONA

Following the principle of contamination of the arts, this text explores the artistic affinity between the work of Mies van der Rohe and that of Kandinskij and Ejzenstejn. The three masters, in their respective fields of expression, have investigated the different conceptions of space, coming to surprisingly similar conclusions. In support of this thesis, a universally recognized masterpiece of the Miesian production is analyzed here: the German Pavilion created for the International Exhibition in Barcelona (1929). The two volumes Punto, linea e superifice and Lezioni di regia , constitute the framework through which the reasoning is here developed.

Representações do Pavilhão da Alemanha de Mies van der Rohe, 1929

O artigo discute o Pavilhão da Alemanha, obra de Mies van der Rohe, projetado e construído para a Exposição Internacional de Barcelona, de 1929. Especificamente, analisa e reflete sobre possibilidades interpretativas que as representações fotográficas oficiais do pavilhão têm oferecido desde sua divulgação, seja a partir de comentários de especialistas e historiadores (que as comentam até nossos dias), seja sob novas óticas (a da lógica visual, por exemplo), relativas às representações gráficas (principalmente a da perspectiva) e a sua influência na construção das imagens de divulgação do conhecido edifício, assim como de sua percepção significativa e expressiva, que há décadas vem sendo mediada por essas imagens.

SUSTAINABILITY LESSONS FROM VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE IN FREI OTTO'S WORK: TENTS AND GRIDSHELLS

Abstract. Frei Otto is usually linked in the historiography of modern architecture to the German Pavilion for the Montreal Expo and the Olympic Stadium in Munich, a couple of works that have typically been regarded as predecessors of High-Tech architecture. But his contribution to architecture goes far beyond these worldwide famous works and can better be traced in his rich experience at the Institute for Lightweight Structures in Stuttgart, as an insightful observer of natural and man-made objects and as an investigator of the relationship between form, force and mass. He has developed new types of structures which often refer to primitive building types and can therefore be easily found in vernacular architecture: tents, nets, gridshells, branching constructions, folding roofs, umbrellas, as well as pneumatic and suspended constructions. All of them are the outcome of a very thorough process of investigation at his institute, which usually also included a survey of these building types in vernacular architecture. The target of this paper is to explore this relationship, and to test whether the strive for lightness can be regarded as a common ground between vernacular architecture and Frei Otto's work. In any case, his endeavour to get the maximum with the minimum, to achieve a lot from a little, is also a key target of sustainability and an essential feature of vernacular architecture.

There was once an empty site

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.

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

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.

Un pabellón, ocho palacios: la construcción de la identidad alemana en Barcelona 1929

El presente artículo resuelve una omisión historiográfica y desvela el contexto olvidado del Pabellón Alemán de la Exposición Internacional de Barcelona 1929. Se ha producido mucha literatura alrededor del mito de un Pabellón que, a pesar de su efímera existencia de ocho meses, se convirtió en una de las obras más importantes del siglo XX. Sin embargo, la relación formal entre los elementos arquitectónicos de este Pabellón y el diseño interior de los 16.000 m2 de secciones industriales alemanas distribuidas en ocho Palacios novecentistas no había sido explorada hasta el momento. Este artículo revela la construcción de una secuencia espacial que vincula el Pabellón con el interior de estos Palacios, y que sirvió a Mies y a Lilly Reich para mostrar arquitectónicamente la identidad distintiva de Alemania a través de la recuperada fortaleza de su tejido industrial.

Seeing is (Dis)Believing: A Reading of Thomas Demand's “Modell/Model” (2000)

AbstractIn this commentary I interpret Thomas Demand's photographic work “Modell/Model” (2000) as undermining the strong temptation to think that when we view a photograph – a light‐capturing mechanism – seeing is believing. Demand provides a regress of models of models (recalling Plato's skeptical view of art as unknowing copies of copies) that ultimately proves unfathomable, hence, uncanny. Demand is the Socrates of contemporary art photography: here seeing is not‐knowing. What we do not know is that Demand's photograph is based on a partially erased paper and cardboard model of the scene depicted in a Nazi era photograph of a model of the German Pavilion (Hoffman, 1937) – which recalls the global ambitions of Nazism and the aesthetic connection Hitler wanted to make between neo‐classical fascist architecture and the “new man” of the Third Reich.

Within a Labyrinth of Gazes: Exhibiting Christoph Schlingensief

Some voices questioned if it would be possible to exhibit Christoph Schlingensief’s work without him, following his death in 2010, due to its performativity and the artist’s role. Indeed, the German Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale became more of a memorial to the artist. Its design was finished without Schlingensief, and instead of setting up an African wellness center, the abandoned set of The Church of Fear of the Stranger in Me (Die Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir, 2008) was installed, accompanied by films and other documents on Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa in Burkina Faso.[1] Accordingly, the Schlingensief retrospective at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2013–2014 was perceived as a “ghost train” and confusing “obstacle course” by some critics.

Review: Frei Otto: Thinking by Modeling

Frei Otto: Thinking by Modeling ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany 5 November 2016–12 March 2017 The German architect and visionary Frei Otto was, throughout his life, true to his unconventional first name: he was a free spirit, inventor, and experimenter. From his time as a student onward, he pushed at the limits of the technologically possible and created spaces that were previously unimaginable. In his dissertation, completed in 1954 and titled “Das hangende Dach” (The suspended roof), he explored the new roof structures that he had encountered when he traveled to the United States in 1950 on a grant from the Technical University of Berlin. Thus he had studied the predecessors of Hugh Stubbins's Kongresshalle before it was erected in Berlin, where he studied and worked. He used the opportunity of being in the United States to visit famous architects, among them the leaders of interwar German innovation, Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Richard Neutra. In 1958, Otto founded the private Institut fur Leichte Flachentragwerke (Institute for Lightweight Structures) in Berlin, where he explored the possibilities of innovative roof construction. In 1964 he moved to Stuttgart, and the institute became affiliated with the university there. From this basis, he worked in close collaboration with other architects and engineers on groundbreaking projects such as the German Pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal; the complex for the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, which he designed with Gunter Behnisch; and finally, in partnership with Ingenhoven Overdiek, the successful 1997 competition entry for the new Stuttgart Central Station, better known as Stuttgart 21. In 2015 Otto was …

Las Exposiciones de 1929 en la prensa española no especializada."Todo es belleza y paradoja en este pabellón"

The year 1929 is a key moment in the evolution of “modern” architecture in Spain. The incipient avant-garde movements had had few opportunities to make themselves known by the general public, beyond some specific experiences. For a few months, the country became the center of international architectural interest thanks to twoexhibitions in Barcelona and Seville. The architecture proposed in both events has been the subject of numerous studies. The aim of this paper is to study how non-specialized press helped to disseminate these architectural proposals among its readers, not used to the tendencies of modern architecture. It has been analysed the impact of the two most important newspapers of the time, ABC and La Vanguardia. Although most of the architecture exhibited was still influenced by the eclectic tradition of the 19th Century, the subjects addressed in the articles and, mainly , the way in which they were written, allow us to contemplate how Spanish society began to know the architecture proposed by the avant-gardes. In this way,the German pavilion of Mies van der Rohe of the Barcelona exhibition became the first purely modern example that got through to the Spanish public by the pages of the daily press.

Fuldskalamodellen. Arkitekturens sande billede mellem realitet og forestilling

The Full-Scale Model. Architecture’s True Image Between Reality and Imagination The paper examines the full-scale architectural model and the question of the truthful image. This question, concerning the representation and its reliability, is continuously present in architecture: to what extent does the architectural image – and we may regard the architectural model as such – provide us with a truthful image of a future project? Architects rely on various types of representations in order to provide an image of a reality yet to come: the realised building. Reality and the image of the possible are fully entangled in the architectural model, in particular in the full-scale model where differences of scale are eliminated. Through a discussion of the virtual and actual aspects of the full-scale model, the paper concludes that the model provides insight into future realities and as such can be regarded as a truthful image, but that it furthermore – due to the ambiguous proximity of the virtual and actual – exposes the question of truth as being contingent on a relation between reality and fiction. The paper is based on analysis of selected empirical cases, including a mock-up of Sverre Fehn’s project for an extension of the Royal Danish Theatre (1996), Robbrecht en Daem architecten’s Mies 1:1. Das Golfklub Projekt (2013), the full-scale model of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s proposal for the Kröller-Müller villa (1912), Bungalow Germania – the German pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2014) and the simulation of the Berlin Castle (1993-94).

Robert H. Kargon; Karen Fiss; Morris Low; Arthur P. Molella. World’s Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology, and Modernity, 1937–1942. viii + 206 pp., illus., bibl., index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. $34.95 (cloth).

Robert H. Kargon; Karen Fiss; Morris Low; Arthur P. Molella. <i>World’s Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology, and Modernity, 1937–1942</i>. viii + 206 pp., illus., bibl., index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. $34.95 (cloth).

The Sequence of Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona: the German Pavilion as Part of a much Larger Industrial Presence

The German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition was part of a much larger exhibiting sequence, which Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich constructed following their main undertaking in the Barcelona industrial exhibits: to design the entire German section. By the time Mies van der Rohe started the project of the German Pavilion, he had already been working for more than 4 months on the construction of the identity and representation of the strength of the German industrial fabric, which he would architecturally express in the interior design of 8 neoclassical palaces. Hence, the two most innovative architectural elements of the German Pavilion – the milky color double-glazed wall and the chrome-plated cross-shaped posts – can be traced back to the interiors of these palaces. The 16,000 m2 of industrial exhibits, not reconstructed in 1986, form today the immaterial heritage that underpins the historical relevance of the Barcelona Pavilion. 3 documents, including a sequence from the official exhibition film, preserve the order linking the range of Mies van der Rohe’s work in Barcelona and broaden the historical meaning of one of the most important works of architectural modernism.

Baukunst and Zeitwille between Europe and America

Mies enjoyed great prominence in Europe and America. Starting in Europe, his first incursions resulted in the German Pavilion for the Barcelona International Exhibition (1929), the Tugendhat House (1930) and the Krefeld silk factory and houses. The Illinois Institute of Technology (1943-1957), the Lake Shore Drive (1951), the Farnsworth House (1951), the Seagram building (1958) and the Toronto-Dominion Centre (1969), bear witness to his work in North America. Back in Berlin, The Neue Nationalgalerie (1968) testifies to the sublime and perfect achievement of his path towards Baukunst and Zeitwille. These ideas, which one may translate, respectively, as the art of building and the will of the time, are anchored in the Mies’s belief that architecture should be metaphysically charged with creative life force. This led him to the modern achievement of developing a new kind of freedom of movement in space, following his sense of order and his very unique conception of urban space.

Traverses of art and audience participation: An interview with Olaf Nicolai

Abstract On the roof of the German pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Olaf Nikolai produced boomerangs whose shape was adapted to local wind currents. He thus reified the conditions of their production, while each thrower individualised each boomerang through their throwing. The art work was thus created only with the help of the participants; similarly to the installation with singers entitled Non Consumiamo... at the exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor at the Arena.

Mies en Bruselas 1934. Síntesis de una arquitectura expositiva no construida

&lt;p&gt;The article delves into the complex world of exhibition architectures, those whose destiny is reduced to be mounted, exposed and dismantled in a short period of time. A process that allows a quick experience of architecture, bounded in time, and whose experimentation gives rise to the birth of new concepts. The text focuses on the German Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe for the Brussels World’s Fair of 1934, his only unbuilt ephemeral architecture due to the political uniqueness of the moment. Now, criticism and the archive allow us to reinterpret its contribution to the history of architecture.&lt;/p&gt;

Natural structures - the research of Frei Otto in natural sciences

Frei Otto (1925 – 2014) is one of the most decorated architects in the 2nd half of the 20th century in the world. He built lightweight structures as the German Pavilion in Montreal 1967, the roofs for the Olympic games in Munich 1972 and numerous tents and shell structures. In his pioneering research he described the growth and form of natural structures in living and non living nature. This contribution highlights Frei Otto’s approach and works.