Every corner of the Barcelona Pavilion
2012/2020A deconstructive study of one of the most celebrated buildings of modern architectural history, the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe. The current pavilion is a reconstruction after the original was removed following the city’s 1929 International Exposition, where it served as the temporary German Pavilion.
The 1980s reconstruction was largely based upon the Berliner Bild-Bericht photographs of the original, and as such the building can be seen as a representation of the photographs as much as the photographs were themselves a representation of the first building.
The same series of black and white images which offered evidence for the reconstruction were also reproduced heavily throughout textbooks used throughout architectural education, firmly embedding the Barcelona Pavilion within the canon of important buildings for study, despite for decades it not existing in physical form.
Now something of a pilgrimage site for architects, it is near-impossible to photograph the place in any way which is not both cliché and almost instructed by the form itself.
This work is a playful attempt to imagine how the Pavilion can be captured but in a somewhat unrecognisable and unreliable way.