The Babel Fiasco (Part VII: The Forbidden House)

With thread firmly in hand we now take a turn into the Barcelon Pavilion.  It , like the child with syphilitic eyes, reminds us to be careful.  The pavilion does not represent failure / equivocation/doubt; it manufactures it.

The Barcelona Pavilion is a Doric temple.

We don’t look at Doric temples anymore.  If we do, we see columns.  this is not what the Greeks saw.  The Greeks saw an image of the discontinuous, of the disintergrated.  They saw past the columns, past the proportioned mass of the building, to the cella; where god lived.  The Doric temple was the house of God, a house that did not admit visitors.  The Doric columns are a screen; a prohibition doubled by the base.

The Barcelona pavilion is  a Doric temple.

It is canonically composed: cella, stylobate, and columns.  Here the Doric order is grotesquely deformed in having outgrown the stylobate (as observed by Jose Quetglas).

There is a problem here, of course.  Mies did not design the stand of columns, rather they pre-date the pavilion, the forbidden house; they stood as a monument to the spatial dislocation.  Mies, however, was a master of the collage.  In his many compositions he shows a lust for assemblage, for difference and for the discontinuous.  In particular the aplique of the landscape on the surface of a window.  The world in abstraction.  The pavilion is a built collage.

In the architecture of Mies van der Rohe we find an obsessive suppression of the vertical.  Even in his skyscrapers there is the desire to prevent the vertical from impacting the expression of the horizontal.  The Glass Skyscraper of 1920-21 is like the stylobate of a temple, an elevated platform – alien to the ground of the viewer – stacked infinitely.  The vision is not vertical, rather an affirmation of the horizontal, a gradual piling, one upon another.

At the lake Shore Drive Apartments (1948-1951) Mies superimposes I-Beams over the structural pillar thereby negating the vertical, condemning it to shadow (we are here reminded of the buttress at Gloucester).

The pavilion is an affirmation of the influence of the Babel Fiasco is Western architecture.  The pavilion affirms the event in its understanding and acknowledgement of the will to the vertical and is an exception from the will in its insistant negation of the vertical and the struggle for eternity.

The building turns in on the view, at once containing and expelling them, it does not (like Virgil) guide the pilgrim through purgatory to another realm.

The Barcelona Pavilion is an enclosed space.

“The pavilion encloses nothing but space and yet does so geometrically rather than in a real physical manner.  There are no doors and yet each room is but imperfectly enclosed, on three sides, by for instance, three walls.  More often than not these walls are great, continuous planes of glass which only limit space partiallyt.  In some of these walls the glass has been tinted a sombre, neutral colour, and they reflect both objects and people in such a way that what you see on the other side of the glass and what you see reflected on its surface seem to blend together.  Some rooms, which are ceilingless, are veritable demi-courtyards in which space is limited only by three walls and by the horizontal surface of the water in the pool, and yet where space is ‘conained’ by geometry” NM Rubio in J.Quetglas, Fear of Glass, Barcelona, 2001

Nicolau M. Rubio’s shrewd description of the pavilion tells us that it “encloses nothing but space” that it can never be filled.  The pavillion can never be filled, not because it is imperfectly sealed but because of its materiality.  The Barcelona Pavilion is made of reflections.  The path we take through the pavilion leads us on into a landscape of infinite depth – the panes of glass, their transparency and reflection, the walls of veins and stone and their reflections, the silent chorus of columns and their reflections.  When we arrive the building vanishes, as we move, the building escapes.  The building is replete in kaleidoscopic finery – the veined marble is quartered, becoming a reflection of itself – the image of narcissus.

Mirrors impoverish rooms, the more crowded a room becomes the greater the mass of the impassable mirror and the emptier the room will be.  The building becomes a stage set in which the crowd are the players but the set makes their image, their names, irrecoverable; it deprives them of their place and condemns them to wander like derelicts.  It is the antithesis of Babel, or rather, it is the recurrence of the event, the building manifests the event rather than being subject to it.  This is why a Miesian plan is anathema to the building.  What is the plan of a mirror?  What is the plan of a Miesian Wall?  A plan is a section through the vertical plane but the vertical is not possible with Mies, there are no walls in the Forbidden House, only mirrors.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote a letter to Philip Johnson in which he says, in reference to the Pavilion, “Some day let’s pursuade Mies to get rid of those damned little steel posts that look so dangerous and interfering in his lovely design.”  There was no need for Wright to go to the effort, Mies did not need convincing.  The columns are masked in reflectivity.  They, like the wanderer, impoverished by reflection.

However, they do serve a master.  The cruciform pillar is machine for defining space.  The pillars form immaterial tangencies that define imaginary space that can never be arrived at.  Unlike the heavy space of the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, the space of the pavilion is weightless – the space is defined by the extended tangents of the cruciform columnm especially so as they define a series of empty boxes each discreet from the other while beckoning the wanderer from ghostly box to ghostly box.  The mirrored stone that segment the spaces defined by the columns further confuses the spaces, preventing a reading of the whole.  The columns become harbingers of the discontinuous.

There is one pillar that stands alone.  In the throne room, by the black carpet, like a sentry it forbids entry despite the emptiness.  It is this centre that both attracts and repels us as we travel throught the pavillion.  We find oursleves standing,waiting unable to step onto such hallowed ground, repelled by the centre which cannoth hold.  This is not a unifying whole, the pavillion cannpt resist consuming itself.  Thus, behind us, we find the hope of another centre – a shining, radiant backlit wall – at last (we think) another Porta Coeli, behind which must be the centre to which we can hold.  We are mistaken.

The wall may be the only source of light but it is encased in white glass, not reflective but placed amidst a sea of concavities; our hectic path brings us upon wall upon wall, we cannot reach the white centre – there is no access to the other side, as the apostle Paul wrote, “God dwells in a light to which there is no access.”

So we continue to crisscross our thread, hurrying now for we feel hot on the trail, entering and re-entering rooms from which it seems someone has just left.  The labyrinth is getting the better of us, our prey will never be found.  It is only when we stop, perhaps back on the edge of the black carpet, that we realise we are our own prey; it is ourselves we have been chasing.  The pavilion, cruel in reflection, forces us to leave just as we arrive, passing the mirror and thereby emptying it.  We come to the end and the beginning of Ariadne’s Thread and all we find is ourselves.

The Babel Fiasco Part I: Stalks Us Like A Black Dog