The German Pavilion By Mies Van Der Rohe

Built for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain, the German Pavilion, designed by Mies van der Rohe, was used for the official opening of the German portion of the exhibition. To this day, the German pavilion is seen as one of the most significant buildings built during the 20th century. When analyzing the building formal, structural, and material qualities, it becomes effortless to support the proposition that the German Pavilion was built with the concepts of nature in mind where Mies van der Rohe successfully blurred the lines between interior and exterior.
Originally named the German Pavilion, the pavilion was built to represent the new look of Germany after World War I, showcasing the nation’s progressively modern culture
This lack of exhibit and program enabled Mies to treat the Pavilion as a continuous space; obscuring the boundaries between inside and outside. The design was established on an absolute distinction between structure and enclosure-a regular grid of cruciform steel columns interspersed by freely spaced planes” (Weston, 2004). To the visitor, the effortless movement through the sequence of spaces makes the visitor forget the boundaries of a building-making one lose awareness on whether they are inside or outside within nature. To increase the continuity of the sequence, Mies placed one statue, Georg Kolbe's Alba, in the inner court to provide a focal point at the end of an important viewing axis, in the small water basin, leaving the larger looking even more empty (Ursel, 2006). Ursel writes, "From now on, in the sense of equality for juxtaposing building and visual work, sculptures were no longer to be applied retrospectively to the building, but rather to be a part of the spatial design, to help define and interpret it” (Ursel, 2006). This moment of stillness interrupts the experience and accentuates the discontinuities between sculpture and architecture, reflecting those between architecture and nature (Constant, 1990). Since the pavilion lacked a conventional exhibition space, Mies presented that the building alone was to become the exhibit- one that is tangible and experiential. The pavilion was designed to disrupt any course through the site, so that one would have no choice but to go within the building. Mies’s vision was that instead of visitors going in a straight line through the building, they would be led through a series of continuous turnabouts starting from the exterior and into the interior (Weston, 2004). The walls not only formally created