Weltbild and Bildwelt: Picturing the Barcelona Pavilion in The Age of Show (original) (raw)

[I]n the artwork the meaning of the object takes on spatial appearance, whereas in photography the spatial appearance of an object is its meaning. Sigfried Kracauer, " Photography " [I]n this age of interface, the image…gives way before something new that I call show. It is the historian's task to fi nd and weigh the evidence establishing whether show is heterogeneous to what has been called image in the past. …Since the sixteenth century…the eye [has been]…but [an] instrument by which images are imprinted. …This identifi cation of vision with inward visualization must be recognized as a crucial achievement of European modernity. …Weltbild…[sig-nifi es] " the image of the world. " …[I]n the nineteenth-century…[it] was used in opposition to " worldview. " …Bildwelt is [a] very new [term]. …It suggests a 'universe of pictures " by which I am surrounded and which hide from me the world of raw things. Their opposition suggests the transition from the visualization of the world to the reduction of the world to a picture. Ivan Illich, " Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show " A symposium such as this underscores both the power and, perforce, the potential problems of architectural reconstructions – analog or digital. [2] The construction of a full-size replica of the Barcelona Pavilion on the site of the 1929 building raises similar if not more perplexing questions. Projecting reconstructions is not new of course; King Solomon reconstructed a dream in the form of a temple to house the arc of the covenant. [3] It is one thing, however, to build based on even the most vivid recollection of a dream state. It seems quite another to create a simulacrum of a building that provokes a kind of dream state in those who are drawn into, often uncritically, representations afforded the status of a realized building. In the case of the Barcelona Pavilion, this happens all too frequently in disciplines as varied as painting, sculpture, landscape architecture, and of course, architecture. The medium that entices the mutability of interpretations and the apparent lack of criticality regarding the Barcelona Pavilion, is the curious combination of the 1986 reconstruction and the photographs of the German Representation Pavilion from 1929. [4] I just came from a conference of architectural historians held a few days ago where a paper presenter, using a 1981 reconstructed plan, photographs of the 1929 building, and her own photographs of the 1986 replica, argued that the Barcelona Pavilion is nothing less than a paradigm of embodied material architecture – a cross roads where phenomenology and architecture meet. That the Barcelona Pavilion can be presented, and readily accepted, as a poster child for phenomenological architecture brings into focus the intoxicating power of the image of a building constructed in photographic space. The canonical photographs of this building may be the single most infl uential and untested images of what has become a paradigm of " modern " architectural form, space, and oddly enough, materiality. The world of 0's and 1's did not create this phenomenon; it has, however, accelerated its development and made more acute its effects on both the culture of images and the image of culture. [5] The 16 Berliner Bild-Bericht master prints, originally owned and controlled by Mies van der Rohe, were bequeathed to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1969. They are an instructive case study of this condition, having elevated the Barcelona Pavilion into a potent and enduring picture of not just modern architecture , but modernity. I focus here on a small part of this larger story, the red curtain. [6] It was ostensibly integral to the interior architecture of the 1929 pavilion (designed by both Mies and Lily Reich) and is now one of the most visually striking aspects of the 1986 reconstruction. [7] I explore the potential meaning of its absence from the 01 02c 3a 3b