The Journal of Architecture
The Journal of Architecture
The Journal of Architecture
Book reviews
To cite this article: (2006) Book reviews, The Journal of Architecture, 11:2, 269-276, DOI:
10.1080/13602360600787173
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The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 11
Number 2
Book reviews
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion have accumulated over time in the ‘mythography’
By George Dodds of the Barcelona Pavilion and of Mies. These range
Routledge, 2005 from the use by Juan Pablo Bonta and others of an
ISBN 0 415 32523 4, £22.50 inaccurate plan of the Pavilion by Werner Blaser to
Paperback, 200pp. with illustrations. what Dodds sees as the unconvincing but commonly
held assertion of the structure’s site-specificity.
Most architectural historians, theorists and critics Dodds argues that this catalogue of misattributions
would not deny that the business of researching and inconsistencies has occurred because in
buildings is a tricky one. The reasons are obvious: dealing with the Pavilion scholars have access to so
buildings are altered or deteriorate over time or little of the evidence which typically guides
may never have been well documented in the first architectural research—plans, elevations, sections,
place, confounding even the most diligent scholar’s drawings, axonometric views, briefs, or the original
attempts to understand an architect’s aesthetic building itself. Although a few writers, notably
intentions and creative process. Lack of an extant Philip Johnson, Peter Blake, or Blaser, were close to
building or of documents can also confound archi- Mies, he refused to shed light on key aspects of
tectural scholars’ attempts to reconstruct the experi- the Pavilion’s construction or even to correct errors
ence of a building. Nonetheless, as George Dodds when he surely knew of them; one example is that
points out in Building Desire: On the Barcelona Blaser produced his inaccurate plan of the Pavilion
Pavilion, that has not stopped many from trying. in 1964 while under Mies’s supervision. (Mies then
Building Desire is a timely work. It engages not gave Blaser his blessing to reproduce the plan in
with Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, but the first edition of Mies van der Rohe: The Art of
with a set of canonical images of the Pavilion— Structure.)
sixteen prints of fourteen views of the structure by What scholars do have are the Berliner Bild-
the Berliner Bild-Bericht company—and traces how Bericht photographs. Consequently, these images
these, along with a small handful of first-hand have lain at the origins of most existing interpre-
accounts, have affected scholarly interpretations of tations of the Pavilion and, Dodds believes, coloured
the building since its opening in May, 1929 and discussions of Mies’s oeuvre and the foundations of
demolition seven months later. Dodds also notes the Modern Movement itself. However, little is actu-
that, in the absence of drawings of the original ally known about these influential black-and-white
Pavilion ‘as-built’, these prints also shaped the recon- prints. The original glass negatives are missing and
struction of the Pavilion by Cristian Cirici, Fernanda presumed destroyed. It is not known who took
Ramos, and Ignazi de Sola-Morales in 1986. them. Nor is it known who subsequently cropped
Dodds’s aims in producing this work are multifold. and painted over several of the prints in MoMA’s
At the most basic level, he is intent on pointing out Mies van der Rohe Collection (which contains the
the factual errors and interpretative muddles which most complete and frequently reproduced set of
Book reviews
prints), but, given that they came from Mies himself, strongly relates to its site—whereas those who have
Dodds presumes he or someone in his office had seen colour photographs or visited the reconstructed
some hand in the process. One thing is certain: the Pavilion in person find the opposite. Dodds notes
photographs are exceptional works of art. Yet other instances where interpretations of the Pavilion
several generations of Mies scholars have treated changed when it was no longer seen in black-and-
them as if they are straightforward documents of white. Attempting to explain Mies’s choice of
the Pavilion’s architecture and of its experience, colours—black carpet, red curtain, gold wall, the
using them to re-create imaginary walks-through colours of the Weimar flag—led certain critics to
of its spaces and to describe its spatial effects. In read the Pavilion as a political statement. However,
this overlaying of the photographic image onto Dodds’s own interest in the Pavilion’s use of colour,
real space, Dodds sees the collective desire to particularly its red curtain, takes him in a different
occupy the space of the original Barcelona Pavilion direction; he speculates that Mies, who was well
which, ambiguous, surreal, labyrinthine, he versed in expressionist set design (for instance, the
equates with the space of modernity. This is the convention of using bright colours to produce
desire of which the book’s title speaks and, like neatly blended greys), made his selection of colours
most desires, can never be fulfilled. and materials with an eye towards how the Pavilion
Unrealisable or not, however, desires have conse- would photograph in black-and-white.
quences. In this instance, Dodds argues that this Dodds’s speculations about colour support a con-
persistent and mostly tacit conflation of the photo- tention at this book’s heart: that Mies was always
graphic image with physical space has meant that it more concerned with the Pavilion’s photographic
is questionable whether or not one can distinguish record than with the Pavilion’s architecture. Rather
in a meaningful way between photographs of the than being the modern architect most attentive to
Pavilion and the original Pavilion structure itself. materials and construction, Dodds argues, Mies
And, certainly, it appears that most scholars have should be recognised as the Modern Movement’s
not really attempted to do so—nor, Dodds notes, most masterful manipulator of images. To support
do they now distinguish between the photographs, his assertion, Dodds points to Mies’s lack of interest
the 1929 Pavilion, and its 1986 reconstruction. in preserving the Pavilion when the opportunity
Critics repeatedly discuss the Pavilion’s spatial effects arose or in correcting facts about the Pavilion’s con-
without clarifying or, perhaps, without realising, struction, layout and materials. In short, Dodds says,
that they are actually commenting on photographic Mies was happy for writers to rely upon the Berliner
effects. As an example, Dodds analyses how Wolf Bild-Bericht prints for information about the Pavilion
Tegethoff’s reading of grainy black-and-white because these images ultimately came closer to the
images leads him to conclude that the foliage and spirit of the building than the building ever did itself;
the texture of the courtyard wall are similar—a con- carefully staged, cropped, and altered, the prints
clusion which supports his argument that the Pavilion shared none of the built work’s imperfections. (Due
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The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 11
Number 2
to financial and time constraints, the original Pavilion well be the book’s most distinctive scholarly contri-
was by necessity crudely done and not built to last, bution. While the degree to which the Pavilion’s
with a cheaply constructed steel-framed roof and an reputation depends on photography may be
unevenly plastered ceiling among other details.) extreme, it is by no means unique. Its example
Despite the skill with which Dodds makes his case, throws up some germane questions about how pho-
his discussion of Mies’s intentions and attitudes does tography and, by extension, other forms of two-
not always convince, possibly because the Mies he dimensional representation, are used within archi-
presents shifts over the course of the book: at tectural scholarship. Dodds is particularly troubled
times, Mies’s conscious manipulation of images by the way in which architectural researchers habitu-
and of people is attributed to his hunger for fame ally conflate photographic with built space, arguing
(which comes at the expense of his collaborator, that by smoothing over the difference, architecture
Lilly Reich); at others, these same manipulations becomes a simulacrum, as the original Pavilion has
are attributed to Mies’s philosophy of truth in archi- itself. He states: ‘It is one thing to recognise [ . . . ]
tecture where ‘if the image of the work adequately that an event may be a prop for its own represen-
reproduced his idea, it was, for him, true’ [p. 129]. tation in another medium; it is quite another to
Moreover, incisive as it is, the author’s analysis of offer up a representation as evidentiary of the
the sixteen Berliner Bild-Bericht prints and of the event’s facticity’ [p. 7].
many histories which rely upon them is unlikely per- This is a significant point, one which may seem
manently to do away with the mythography sur- obvious. But working out how to counter this
rounding the Pavilion, not least because it is these tendency is far less obvious as it is so deeply
very myths that have made it such a provocation embedded. It is generally assumed that architectural
for other artists, architects, and architectural researchers, mostly trained architects, are able to
writers in the first place. As Dodds puts it: ‘The Ber- ‘read’ two-dimensional representations spatially. It
liner Bild-Bericht prints do not document a building; is this skill which sets architectural historians apart
they anticipate an architecture’ [p. 89]. Dodds is too from historians in other disciplines—the architec-
perceptive an historian not to realise that, without its tural historians’ version of einfühlen 1—allowing
myths, the Pavilion would not be such a potent repo- them effectively to step into any given building in
sitory for collective desire. He also knows that, their mind’s eye; to move through its rooms; to re-
underneath the layers of myths, there is no longer create an architect’s creative process; and to recon-
an ‘authentic’ Pavilion to recover. With these struct his and occasionally her aesthetic intentions.
insights, his attempts to deconstruct the Pavilion’s Yet, as the case of the Pavilion demonstrates, such
mythology take on a certain—not unfitting— visual evidence tends to be read factually, for what
ambivalence. it can reveal about a building, without the specificity
Dodds comes out much more strongly in his cri- of the media being taken into account. While
tique of architectural methodology—and this may Dodds’s primary concern is photography, the
272
Book reviews
problem his case study raises is actually broader. Mies van der Rohe: The Krefeld Villas
With the growing interest in considering how By Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer
buildings are consumed as well as how they are Princeton Architectural Press, 2005
produced, the possibilities for what constitutes ISBN 1-56898-503-7, £25.00
evidence within architectural history have expanded Hardback, 144pp. with illustrations.
in recent years to embrace literature, film, and
experiential narratives. Yet what is the status Following up their key monograph Villa Müller: A
of such non-architectural documentation? And Work of Adolf Loos (PAP, 1994), Kent Kleinman
how should it be interpreted by architectural and Leslie Van Duzer deliver an equally meticulous
researchers? study of two villas which are little known within
These are questions which are only beginning to Mies’s oeuvre. The Krefeld villas, Haus Lange, and
be asked within the architectural discipline. By way its neighbour, and variant, Haus Esters, were con-
of an initial reply, Dodds calls upon scholars to under- structed between 1927 and 1930 for two wealthy
score the difference between the building and the industrialists, Hermann Lange and Josef Esters, in
image in order to reattach value to each. More the suburbs of Krefeld, then a major centre for
intriguingly, he suggests that modern architectural Germany textile industries close to the Dutch
scholars—as representatives of a discipline bound border. With their discretely articulated, albeit exten-
up with the making of images—should see it as part sive windows, cellular plan and brick exterior
of their responsibility to keep a critical eye on both surfaces, the villas sit somewhat awkwardly in
the production and consumption of images. With relation to Mies’s work at this time. Given that his
this proposition, scholars would find themselves seminal works, the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa
at work in an expanded field of architectural Tugendhat, were completed in 1929 and 1930
knowledge where each form of evidence has its respectively, we might imagine that the Krefeld
own history, context and effects. One finishes villas represent the end of an earlier tendency in
Dodds’s book with the hope that the possibilities of his work, one superseded by the sort of clarity of
such a shift will be a subject of strong debate in material and spatial purpose visible in Barcelona
coming years. and Brno. Why, then, do these villas deserve a
monograph?
Barbara Penner
The topic of the study is not so much the villas as
The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK
the Miesian oeuvre itself. The villas are analysed as a
way of interpreting how the figure and legacy of
Note Mies has been constructed. Thus the aim at the
1. Einfühlen was used by Johann Gottfried Heider in the outset seems not to be a recuperation of the villas
eighteenth century to describe the ability to enter, and a claim for their centrality, but rather the use
inhabit and feel oneself into other time. of their very marginality as a point of leverage
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