January 2009 Archives

The idea of the pavilion is an omnipresent scheme in Mies’s oeuvre. From his first commission the Rhiel house in Potsdam (1907) to his last one the National Gallery in Berlin. For Mies the pavilion was a mediating space between intellect and nature, inner and outer world, architecture and landscape, the dream of a new beauty that would reunite man with nature, a continuum of open space, a generous expanse of nature and landscape terrain.

Through the new methods in construction techniques and new materials it became possible to structure space freely, open it up and integrate it with the landscape.

Mies saw in this method the need of modern man for space fulfilled. What characterized that need for Mies was a higher unity between man, building and surrounding which had evolved from the philosophical tradition of German Idealism.

Since the Enlightenment the pavilion as a building type has been the crucible of new concepts and spatial ideas. In his influential study von Ledoux bis LeCorbusier, Emil Kaufmann saw the breaking open of Baroque containment in the pavilion system as the decisive development in the architecture of the French revolution. Comparably important in the rise of modernism, and traceable again to innovations in pavilion design, where the attraction to archetypes,

the urge to pierce the block and the attempt to bring the building into emotional harmony with the landscape.

Mies said “ Nature too should be allowed to lead her own life. We should beware of disturbing her with the bright colors of our houses. But we should endeavor to bring together nature, houses and people in a higher unity. If you look at nature through the glass of the Farnsworth House, it assumes a deeper meaning than if you stand outside. More of nature is expressed – nature becomes part of a larger totality.

One day we shall need some recognition of what is lacking in our big cities; spaces quiet and wide, spacious places for reflection, places with long, high-ceilinged galleries that keep us from bad weather or from too much sun, that protect us from the noise of carriages and street vendors…

The Barcelona grid is a total denial of nature, here nature is confronted with the rhythm of man’s superimposed geometry. The Barcelona grid is a white ground.

Block versus Pavilion- The Pavilion in a Block

The idea is to reinterpret the pavilion, instead of opening it up towards the non existing landscape, piercing the block, constructing a structural skeleton, as described above to let the landscape shine through the space–

I want to closing it up – protecting it, shielding it from the urban surrounding in order  to let it contain nature itself. Which means to switch the role between foreground and background.

The landscape that is usually the background transforms into the main focus of attention.

To follow once again Mies’s example in expressing the Zeitgeist of our times, it can’t be nature in the sense of real nature, not even in the sense of a park but rather to speak in Baudrillard’s words (since we are living in an age of simulation) - it has to be a replica, a simulacra of nature, a second nature in nature.

I’m proposing a Garden of pleasure – (the contemporary picturesque) in the depth of the Block.

Design strategy – 3 different wall layers in regard to Mies 3 different platforms

 (The entry platform the house platform the glass box)

 will act as a filter to produce a perfectly artifical landscape within the block. The outer one will adapt some traits of the surrounding the further we go inside we’ll leave the urban scene behind.

The wall layers act as antithesis to Mies’s Column – Wall relationship and will be structurally load-bearing.