Memo 005

Photographing, Re-photographing. Images, Imaging.
The Barcelona Pavilion(s) of Infinite Imaginary.

Nicholas Chung, 22 September 2023


Arguably one of the most significant pieces of architecture in modern canon, the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe is proliferated through the education of design, the celebration of the, then, new modern aesthetics through numerous exhibitions and citations in history books, with its original plans and construction documents in MoMA venerated as relics of its zeitgeist. Yet despite its longevity in terms of cultural cache, the physical pavilion was demolished in 1930, seven months after its construction.

What remains, then, are photographs (as well as a reconstruction years later) that keep the spatial image of the Barcelona Pavilion alive in popular culture. Images are therefore not only necessary to the registered documentation of the project, but are also critical to the survival of ideologies. During the 1930s, Mies had his project documented as photo-negative plates by prominent photographer Berliner Bild-Bericht, which were then published and circulated through journals and magazines. Those images, in turn, were copied, cropped, and recirculated, creating a genealogy tree of an iconic image with one traceable original. The image, therefore, becomes disentangled from its imaging, with the latter being “meaning” (Hall 54) and the former its medium. In Saussurian terms, what is signified is no longer affixed to a static image, or signifier. ‘Static’, in this case, refers to the subject-frame relationship that is compressed onto an iconographic plane. Any image of any tree will signify a tree. Similarly, any image of a specific view of the Barcelona Pavilion, would suffice to evoke the impression of Bild-Bericht original plates. To that extent, the image becomes temporally insignificant, for it only signifies what it is projecting, the question of original versus mutation is less problematic when compared to the mass proliferation of imaging. Stuart Hall would attest that the problem of “asymmetry” between “codes of encoding and decoding” (Hall 54) resolves itself since “the lack of equivalence” and “naturalized codes” (Hall 56), ironically, eliminate the need of an authoritative original being the only reliable signifier.




Although the pavilion and its contemporary reproduction have been heavily documented in its entirety, one of its most publicized views is arguably its elevation. Yet, despite being so infamous as an image, one does not recall the details of the image in its composition. Fragments, components, and arrangements form the basis of the expected perspectival view of water, marble, and glass planes intersecting each other. All the photographs above show the building from more or less the same point of view, yet without their captions, there is no way to discern originality or chronology. Even in Bild-Bericht’s original plates, there is a discrepancy in the background for the images were taken at the beginning and end of the original pavilion’s lifespan. The scaffolding in the background as well as the constructed spire indicates different temporal contexts, yet it is easily overlooked without close examination. The third and fourth images by Jezyk and Corbis are of the contemporary reconstruction, but even through their differences we “decode” the same meaning: the imaging projected through the now-iconographic signifier of history, cultural cache, and reverence behind Mie’s masterpiece. It is even more noteworthy that although the third and fourth images are photographs of the reconstructed pavilion, the primary meaning interpreted by the audience is not of artifice or allusion, but of Mie’s intentions. To that extent, even the subject of what is photographed does not matter since different signifiers can refer to the same thing via human imagination. The image is an “echo over substance” (Dodds 68) for the prints “have been published so often, in so many guises, that it is problematic to continue viewing them as neutral, visual documentation” (Dodds 72) of what the original images literally imply or signify. The image is therefore a tool of cultural proliferation, for its tangibility makes the ideas behind them accessible and transmittable. It also makes them archivable and redistributable. The specificity and definition behind the images of the pavilion no longer matter for multiplicity is arguably more desirable in the dissemination of an idea, a spatial image, or spatial identities. Our relationship of admiration to the notion of Mie’s design is no longer entangled with either the image or even the physical existence of what it signifies.

Images are physical ‘things’ (as Elizabeth Grosz would put it) that people circulate which signify the same imaging; imaging implies a specific condition of experience, but not total reality. In which case, it must be asked why the permanence or degree of determinacy of images is no longer important, or even more cynically, matter less than their effects. Siegfried Kracauer notes that there is a distinction between ‘photographic image’ and ‘memory image’, the former being space-time compressed into a limited frame, the latter being the mental image we associate to a space and its temporality. The latter abstracts the multiplicities of the ‘real’ and simplifies it to basic associations. For example, when you are asked to recall the Mona Lisa without previously intently studying it, it is unlikely that you will remember the background, the exact shades, the patina, or even the exact facial expression. The painting and its subject exist as a vague blur with a few, highly specific characteristics we associate with it, such as ‘Da Vinci’, ‘eyes that follow you’, ‘a melancholic smile’, and how her body is positioned. In that sense, the ‘memory image’ is less reliable than ‘photographic images’, but still seem more realistic or dependable to the human mind for we attach emotions and our personal experience to them. For the Mona Lisa, we register and retain the elements that generated the initial surprise and shock from its novelty. For the Barcelona Pavilion, we attach the ‘eureka!’ moment of understanding its modernist idealisms and simple pleasure to its aesthetically pleasing composition, in stark contrast to how buildings looked back in the day. As such, our impression of its imaging is highly conditioned, and often predetermined, by how it already exists as ‘collective memory’, as part of the civic narrative. Stavros Stavrides writes that “collective memory, thus, uses space as a kind of repository of meaning, open to those who know how to navigate their way in an inhabited environment marked by socially recognizable indicators” and that it is “always-in-the-making” as a contested dynamic process. (Stavrides 183) The various frames of the Barcelona Pavilion collectively create a democratic collage of its ‘memory image’, which is then proliferated and further enforced through its circulation across lateral space and continuing history.

In comparing ‘memory images’ and ‘photographic images’, Siegfried Kracauer notes that “photographs grasps what is given as spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory images retain what is given only as far as it has significance” and “since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or […] temporal terms, memory images are at odds with photographic representation.” (Kracauer50-51) A specific view from a specific angled frame with a specific aspect ratio has been so highly proliferated through journals, academia, and popular media that a static expectation of not only how it looks, but also how it is presented to us has developed. George Dodds remarks that “the sedimentation of mythology built up around the Barcelona Pavilion during the past seventy-five years has resulted in a virtual labyrinth of interpretation” (Dodds 69) rooted in that static presentation, especially sine the original pavilion no longer exists. As such, any image that is not almost identical to how Bild-Bericht initially photographed the pavilion not only destabilizes its ‘memory image’, it also antagonizes the ideologies and academic authority that depends on a perceived temporal rigidity in its imaging. Anna Mas’s photograph of Spencer Finch’s installation at the pavilion is an example of that interplay between ‘memory’ and ‘photograph’.

The installation, titled “Fifteen Stones”, brings “the Ryoan-ji zen garden into the water mirror of the Barcelone Pavilion, two physical spaces that understand as catalysts for abstract thought”. (Domus) But beyond its philosophical contemplations, it is arguable that Mas’s framing draws out the potency of her subject. The photograph intentionally puts itself at direct odds with the collective ‘memory image’, juxtaposing itself as an exception to our impression and redirecting the viewer’s eye to what stands out: Finch’s addition to the spatial image. This preconceived expectation Mas leverages to generate attention goes back to the problem that images, as individual physical mediums, are becoming less permanent and more disposable. If every image is expected to be the same, they lose significance. This ‘same-ness’ is decided by “traditional functions of fine art, the definition of what is fine and desirable for the ruling class, and therefore ultimately that which is desired by all society.” (Smithson) They accumulate as fragments and aggregate into a projection of society’s capacity to store or “collect” these images. The image is at this point less about what it is projecting, but more about what the photographer, the editor, and the publisher want to project to their audience. It loses its authority as reliable documentation the moment it becomes open for popular consumption.

Art historian Giulio Carlo Argan would agree that these proliferated images are no longer reliable as a means of documenting imaging. He writes that “the image is worn out, consumed, recited for the thousandth time, or deformed by the careless habit by which it has been adapted to the most varied occasions,” (Argan 4) thereby increasing the static noise distorting the interpretation, or ‘decoding’, of what is transmitted. In addition, Argan writes that “the image which is discredited or sometimes contaminated by ingenious associations, combinations, or even by banal confusions with other latent images in the memory is the document of a culture of the diffused image.” (Argan 4) This means that images as transmitters of ‘meaning’ are neither merely independent autonomies, nor just instruments of social conditioning, but are also engaged differently according to how they self-localize or position themselves with their receivers. If imaging and the image are independent of one another, imaging is distorted by the consumption culture in which society, collectively, values and coexists with images in general. Especially in a technocratic age whereby everything is about speed and economy, our relationship with images is steeped in our modes of communication. Experience requires a culture to diffuse its images in order to unshackle them from discrete conditions of interpretation, to such an extent that images are either too abstract to derive anything but its obvious meaning, or too complex to analyze independent of its history and ‘inter-image’ relations.

Sidenotes:



Argan, Giulio Carlo. “Ideology and Iconography”. The Language of Images, edited by WJT Mitchell, University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Dodds, George. “Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion”. Routledge, 2005.

Domus. “Ryoan-ji Zen Garden and the Barcelona Pavilion: Two Icons Meet”. 2018.

Glancey, Jonathan. “Why the Barcelona Pavilion is a Modernist Classic”. BBC, October 2014.

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse”. Birmingham: Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography”. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, translated by Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard University Press, June 2005.

Smithson, Alison and Peter. “But Today We Collect Ads”. Ark Magazine, No.18, Royal College of Art London, November 1956.

Stavrides, Stavros. “The City as Commons”. Zed Books, 2016.

Wade, Stephine. “The Barcelona Pavilion by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe is a Textural Delight”. Ignant, February 2020.