Fear of Glass
Fear of Glass: Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion in Barcelona
Josep Quetglas
Birkhäuser, January 2001
Paperback | 6-3/4 x 6-1/4 inches | 200 pages | English (translated by John Stone & Rosa Roig) | ISBN: 978-3764363390
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Barcelona at the end of the twenties: Mies van der Rohe is commissioned to design the German contributions for the 1929 International Exhibition, one of them being the German Pavilion. Today, his brief for this building reads like a manifesto of modern architecture: a contemporary building, an imposing stage, a timeless work of art -- an outstanding example of where the attempt to solve the puzzle of modern architecture took shape. Shortly before Germany embarks on a catastrophe for civilization, a German architect creates a masterpiece of the avant-garde, an icon of modern architecture.
"For me, the time I spent working in Barcelona was a shining moment in my life." -- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1957
Josep Quetglas is Professor of the Higher Technical School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and author of numerous publications on theory and criticism of Architecture.
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A century ago was the onset of the Roaring Twenties, a decade of prosperity that also saw the first important works of modern architecture, such as Le Corbusier's villas in and around Paris. That decade ended with a stock market crash but also a world's fair with one of the most revolutionary modern structures ever created, one so important it was rebuilt six decades later. That pavilion is, of course, the Barcelona Pavilion, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich as the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition.
With the pavilion's centenary slowly approaching, we are seeing the start of what will surely be a number of books devoted to it. The Fundació Mies van der Rohe, for example, co-published a scholarly history of the pavilion a couple years ago, and last year the account by Ignasi de Solà-Morales and others of the pavilion's 1986 rebuilding was republished. This year sees at least three books on the Barcelona Pavilion, one consisting primarily of photographs, a second one billed as "the complex history of a building," and the third (a companion to the second, edited by its author, Dietrich Neumann) made up of 100 texts written over the last 90 years.
My library has just one book about the Barcelona Pavilion, Fear of Glass, a transcription of one of Josep Quetglas's lectures, with his words accompanied by many archival photos and specially made drawings. It could very well be multiple lectures, given that it's organized into three "acts," each with three "scenes." The author's takes on the pavilion and the wider oeuvre of Mies are idiosyncratic and meandering (in a good way), beginning with his assertion that "yes, the German pavilion would be a Doric temple" and ending, appropriately, with its dismantling in 1930. Along the way are chapters comparing Mies and Frank Lloyd Wright, exploring horizontality in Mies's buildings, and, of course, delving into glass, one of the pavilion's few materials.
Even though there is a flow to the book, akin to it coming from a lecture, I don't think his account needs to be read in order. Each chapter — its contents signaled by their illustrations rather than their generic act/scene titles — can be read individually, the author's positions eventually accumulating in the reader's mind. Similarly, one could read the book through Quetglas's apparent inner monologues, set off from, and inserted into, the lecture transcription through bold and bracketed text. However one reads Fear of Glass, it's clear that the pavilion designed by Mies and Reich allows for almost infinite insights and interpretations.
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