The Death(s) : O(n)(f) (the) Pavilion

We started the way promised, now, with these notes, notes reading Derrida and Barthes in parallel on photography, and both, of course, in parallel with Mies and the Barcelona Pavilion. Several parallel, which, moreover, and precisely because so, they do not other thing but crossing one another.

The question of photography here is paramount for several reasons, not the least because the fact that, as will be discussed throughout this text, the images called canonical, and the word is accurate, because in a certain canon, a measure of order and perfection they have become—not otherwise have been reconstructed the building than bearing the bulk of the information from these images and above all, trying to imitate them in its final appearance, which makes the images something like the platonic forms than a contemporary demiurge have nothing but translate from its maximum pure ideal to the inevitably confusing world of preolimpic Barcelona. The photographs, we say, that appear and reappear in the different ways of the original building are just some very special photographs: those taken by the German based Berliner Bild Bericht during the exhibition, the only memories (or almost) for over fifty years of what happened in 1929. There are not, we have to sat, these beautiful photographs the only ones remaining, but they are surely the privileged: finished the period of the exhibition itself, during which appeared in several newspapers and cultural magazines some different pictures—in general snapshots of daily events: nowadays are very famous the photographs showing the inauguration of the Pavilion with the presence of King Alfonso XIII and Mies with a hat, resting hastily in his impeccable tuxedo—, in strictly architectural publications, and until the end of the seventies, that were practically the only ones that any one could see.

Among them, a photograph in particular, a very particular photograph indeed, gives us an even more acute puncture—or sting—and request us a special gaze—and a blindness—at the beginning of this text: one that shows, with the famous plane of onyx in escorzo in the middle of it, in an overabundance of reflexes, a ghostly text that we do not know where it came from, or why or how, but where it could be read, with a not so big effort, and despite specular inversion, a much banal sentence: gustaciones gratuitas.

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Indeed, as is known, Mies van der Rohe monitored carefully what images were published of the work since its completion, in more than a deliberate attempt to build also a specific image of himself, not allowing in its various publications and monographs in life rather than the reproduction some, not all —for example, never was published that one showing the so-called light shaft illuminated at night: Mies always disliked the constructive solution of this element, as the lighting system used, incandescent light bulbs, cast so many shadows that ruined the effect—of this canonical photographs.

In fact, many of them were retouched (cut, painted, treated: forced), if not directly by the architect, surely under his supervision, as is evidenced in the photographs preserved from his office in the Mies van der Rohe's legacy at the MoMA Archives. To which we must add that, surely destroyed in the war the negatives of these images, the only thing that remains are the master copies, although of course, top quality, then, reaching eventually the rank of originals (we’ll return on this). So, there would be not the reception, but the work itself, been different if we inherited a different set of photographs than that, without being that images able to convey the sense of technical precision, melancholy and outside of time as they do, without tempting us with, at the same time its timelessness (in terms of cutting in/through time, of spacing) and its absolute temporality (in terms of presence of event).

In a broader reflection, in all contemporary architecture photography as a tool of reception has played a key role. Since the spread of lithography and procedures, in the early twentieth century, allowing a reproduction of the image with sufficient quality and at sufficient low cost, effective dissemination of architecture through the image suffered a dramatic change. A transformation in how we see the architecture that extends, of course, until now, not yet replaced by the virtual image—it will not take longer—: photography has become the architecture. Not only does not exist the architecture that is not showed in photography, but it is also, largely, that the perception in itself has become an exercise purely visual, so that not only would not be necessary to see the architecture in place (to see: stroll, hear, smell, taste the architecture), but rather, it would be harmful, since the apolline image (and here there is no reference to Nietzschean thinking) forged in the pages of the magazines, for bad (or good) does not match the 'real': they could never do, which inevitably entail its destruction. This is a phenomenon not strictly architectural, of course, that has to do with the enhancement of the value of the image in the culture of the last century up to unbearable limits (discussed at length since Benjamin and Heidegger until postmodern reflections of Lyotard or Baudrillard, we will not enter here in this issue), but in architecture reaches a unique status. And that has made us forget, of course, how we should deal with photography, or what tells us, what it says beyond its supplementary condition, of simulation that has become real. Indeed, a simulacrum that is more real than the real, if there is the 'real'.

Let us then (and that’s the reason of this is the long exordium) try to see photography and architecture differently, i.e. try to overcome the immediate identification that has occurred between architecture and photography of architecture, because it is the only way we can then deal with Barcelona Pavilion avoiding the trap that Mies had tended to us, bypassing, as has been said, the perverse conversion of the image in the totality, but, and this is, of course, the paradox, the udecidable aporia, being unable to rid the assurance that, now rebuilt the building, the more direct access to the secret (to its crypt) that hides the Barcelona architecture, however, is given precisely by these original photographs but also by the knowledge of this fact: while these photographs are the only image we have of a building that no longer exists even existing, it is precisely the deferring of time that any photograph introduces what renders us the perfect picture (or perhaps de-formed) of architecture. And it is this, this intromission of time in the reduced space of photographic paper, to which lead us this reflection, that, as we said, passes trough the text (on photography) of Roland Barthes and the reading that makes of some of his texts Derrida. We’ll see that.

JOSE VELA CASTILLO