Barcelona Pavilion | Mies Van Der Rohe

The Barcelona Pavilion (Catalan: Pavelló alemany; Spanish: Pabellón alemán; “German Pavilion”), designed by Ludwig Mies van derRohe and Lilly Reich, was the German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain.

This building was used for the official opening of the German section of the exposition. It is an important building in the history of modern architecture, known for its simple form and spectacular use of extravagant materials, such as marble, red onyx and travertine.

The same characteristics of minimalism and spectacularity can be applied to the prestigious furniture designed specifically for the building, including the iconic Barcelona chair. It has inspired many important modernist buildings.

The German Pavilion for the Barcelona exhibition

Every world exhibition of the last century drew portraits of countries. The Barcelona pavilion was its hallmark. However, judging by the pavilion of the 1929 Barcelona World Exposition, Germany looked beautiful, free and rich.

The Barcelona pavilion was built by the architect of the last century, the German Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. This was the most perfect building of the time, representing the “modern movement”, the international style. Since then nothing more beautiful has been created in this style. It was impossible to check it anyway. The location of the Barcelona pavilion is Av. Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, 7, 08038 Barcelona, Spain.

The legend existed for three months and disappeared, leaving only plans and photos. But in the 1980s, when it was not fashionable to follow the ideas of Mies van der Rohe, any fool laughed at the international style, several Catalan architects decided to restore the Barcelona pavilion by mies van der rohe. And they did it with exceptional precision and care. So now it is accessible to sight, touch and even understanding.

The 1929 Barcelona Pavilion is one of the most important works of the modern movement, designed by the German architect Mies van der Rohe. Let’s remember that universal expositions are international events that used to be held at different intervals and today take place every five years with the intention of promoting industrial and technological progress by showing those technical and scientific innovations that can bring about improvements in the living conditions of our planet.

The first exhibition was held in London in 1851, followed by Paris and other cities until arriving in Barcelona in 1929, the exhibition was a pretext to revalue and provide services to the city being a wave of renovation that mainly affected the mountain of Montjuic and also carried out a series of works in Barcelona as the electric lighting of the city, the airport, the layout of roads, sewerage and other improvements.

Other countries took these development interventions as an example to reactivate their economy. Each participating country was involved in the realization of its pavilion trying to summarize in the interior its main aspects, philosophy and style.

Germany put its architect Mies van der Rohe in charge of the design of its space in the summer of 1928, just one year before the opening of the exhibition. The aim of the work was to symbolically represent the progressive, democratic, prosperous and pacifist character of the new Weimar Republic, recovering an image lost after the First World War.

The Barcelona pavilion and its spatial analysis, what we see today, is the result of the work carried out between 1983 and 1986 by a team of Spanish architects composed of Ignasi de solà morales, Cristian cirici and Fernando ramos who, based on the documents they had at their disposal at the time, reconstructed the floor plan of the Barcelona pavilion, remaining faithful to the original that was dismantled at the end of the exhibition in January 1930.

The first plot is a corridor of travertine marble panels that gives access to the central courtyard almost entirely occupied by a large rectangular pond whose bottom is covered by river stones, in a corner of the plot there is a small service building leaning against the wall that delimits on one side a long simple and schematic bench lined with the same material, the classic Roman travertine and water surface forces the visitor to make a 180 degree turn to enter the building suddenly and after the turn the flat reinforced concrete cover is released behind the wall suspended in the void and impacts by the extreme lightness of its form.