THE BARCELONA PAVILION AS LANDSCAPE GARDEN: MODERNITY and the PICTURESQUE Author(S): Caroline Constant Source: AA Files, No
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THE BARCELONA PAVILION AS LANDSCAPE GARDEN: MODERNITY AND THE PICTURESQUE Author(s): Caroline Constant Source: AA Files, No. 20 (Autumn 1990), pp. 46-54 Published by: Architectural Association School of Architecture Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29543706 . Accessed: 26/09/2014 12:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Architectural Association School of Architecture is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to AA Files. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 12:50:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE BARCELONA PAVILION AS LANDSCAPE GARDEN MODERNITY AND THE PICTURESQUE Caroline Constant 'A work of architecture must not stand as a finished and self afforded Mies the freedom to pursue the expressive possibilities of sufficient object. True and pure imagination, having once entered the discipline. During the 1920s he had begun to abandon the formal the stream of the idea that it expresses, has to expand forever logic of the classical idiom, with itsmimesis of man and nature, in beyond thiswork, and itmust venture out, leading ultimately to the favour of specifically architectural means. Many of Mies's con? infinite. Itmust be regarded as the point at which one can make an temporaries resorted to imagery from other sources, such as orderly entry into the unbreakable chain of the universe.'1 engineering, an expedient that bases its claim to validity on that discipline's objective nature. For Mies, however, artistic objec? To propose thatLudwig Mies van der Rohe conceived of his tivity derived from the assertion of differences rather than meta? German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International phorical similarities. The meaning of the Barcelona Pavilion is not Exposition as a landscape may challenge conventional conveyed through a priori formal logic or the representation of readings of his architecture, although these have undergone con? some external reality but is given to sensual and temporal ex? siderable re-evaluation since 1986, when the Pavilion was recon? perience.8 While immersed in the experience of Mies's pavilion, structed on its original site.2 To assert his debt to the Picturesque the spectator is simultaneously distanced from it. Such contradic? in thiswork is a more subversive claim. After all, the Picturesque tions were nascent in the Picturesque. is associated with emotive appeal, formal eclecticism and artifice, The Picturesque is an elusive concept.9 Certain discrepancies while Mies identified his aims with rationalism, the rejection of arise from the term's etymological origins in painting. Alexander formal issues, and realism.3 Mies's debt to the Picturesque is not Pope first used it, in annotations to his translations of Homer, to ? as precedent; rather, itprovides a means to transcend the difficulty refer to a theme appropriate to a history painting one that of his work. Positing theBarcelona Pavilion within the Picturesque represents a significant human action based on verbal narrative and landscape tradition thus elicits speculation about both the build? conveyed iconographically.10 Pope conceived of his garden at ing's significance and the repressed role of the Picturesque in Twickenham in analogous terms; itwas a locus of human action, its modernism. meaning conveyed iconographically to the knowledgeable viewer There is only minor evidence inMies's writings to support this moving from object to object. By the late eighteenth century, claim, and it concerns a later project. Describing his Museum for a however, the term 'picturesque', as a result of its association with Small City (1943), he argued that 'the barrier between thework of the genre of landscape painting, was more commonly used to refer art and the living community is erased by a garden approach for the to the aesthetic qualities of irregularity, roughness and complexity ? display.'4 Similarly, the eighteenth-century English landscape and thus to the type of English garden devised to imitate nature. garden sought to dissolve the visual distinction between garden and In its appeal to the visual faculty, the Picturesque landscape depen? landscape. For Horace Walpole the ha-ha was 'the capital stroke, ded for itsmeaning on the interpretive powers of the individual the leading step to all that has followed'.5 He credited William imagination. Kent with the genius to discern its significance: 'He leaped the The assertion of aesthetic distance was a primary accomplish? ? fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.'6 In the Barcelona ment of the Picturesque an effect simulated by theClaude Glass, Pavilion Mies elaborated that earlier leap. Yet his challenge lay, not a darkened, concave mirror that could reduce a natural scene to fit in the visual extension of space, as numerous interpretations of the into the palm of a hand. While it renders Nature an object of Pavilion have claimed, but rather in the conceptual boundaries of manipulation, the Picturesque garden is perceived, not as a thing in the discipline. itself, but as a series of relationships that are gradually revealed to Any interpretation of the Barcelona Pavilion as landscape must themoving spectator. For Mies, as for the Picturesque landscape transcend Mies's tendency, like that of Schinkel (who inspired his designer, the lack of resolution inherent in such contradictions was early work), to challenge the formal boundaries between archi? the starting-point for the ongoing process of interpretation. tecture and landscape. As Mies argued, 'Form is not the aim of our The term 'pavilion' was first associated with garden structures work but only the result.'7 Indeed, the Pavilion's tectonic means for temporary shelter in the late seventeenth century;11 such are unquestionably architectural. With no programmatic con? buildings provided the architectural leitmotif of the English land? straints other than to represent the democratic Weimar Republic, scape garden, which emerged in the following century as a vehicle the commission to design the German Pavilion in Barcelona of the new sensibility. Likewise, the Barcelona Pavilion lacked a 46 AA FILES 20 This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 12:50:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions specific programme; rather, it provided a momentary pause in an itinerary through the exposition grounds. Rejecting overt historical references, however, Mies undermined the object status of his structure. There are no fa9ades in the traditional sense. The need for boundaries between inside and outside, functionally necessary in most buildings, does not pertain. Thus the doors, positioned for security rather than to delimit threshold, were removed during exposition opening hours to preserve the spatial continuity. As a result, the Barcelona Pavilion is a labyrinth, a 'montage of con? tradictory, perceptual facts';12 itsmeaning is generated through the experience of a circuit that suggests parallels with those of the English landscape movement. Early plans (Fig. 1) indicate Mies's explicit use of Picturesque devices. He distributed three pedestals for statues throughout the Pavilion, each positioned to provide a focal point at the end of a major viewing axis. The sequence is analogous to the eighteenth ? century pictorial circuit a series of points at which a view is contrived to arrest the progress of the observer (Fig. 2). Moreover, thesemoments of stasis punctuate the experience and accentuate the discontinuities between sculpture and architecture, reflecting those between architecture and landscape in the earliest English land? scape gardens. Ultimately, Mies reduced the number of statues to one, that in the inner court (Fig. 1), to increase the continuity of the sequence. There is only one relative point of stasis, and it focuses, not on the statue, but on a wall of onyx doree, which Mies from the early conceptual stages endowed with iconic value. By eliminating these sculptural focal points, he rejected pictorial means and overcame a tendency common to the early Picturesque garden, that of focusing attention on objects rather than the landscape. This momentary pause relies, not on the contrast between architecture and sculpture, but between elements conceived as part of an architectural system and an isolated architectural element, elevated, like the single column in the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, to the level of the sacred.13 1. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: German Pavilion, International Mies's of means that of rejection pictorial goes beyond per? Exposition, Barcelona, 1928-9. Above: Floor plan, first preliminary certain formal similarities between his for a spective. Despite plan scheme. Pencil on tracing, 48.3x91.4 cm. Centre: Floor plan, second Brick Country House (1924) and Theo van Doesburg's painting preliminary scheme. Pencil, coloured pencil on tracing, 47.8x87.4 cm. Rhythms of a Russian Dance (1919), Mies denied that there were Below: Reconstruction of theplan as built. any de Stijl influences in his work.14 The differences are funda? mental. In their