Column, Sculpture, Wall

Paying homage to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 30 years after the reconstruction of his Pavilion, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona organised a symposium presenting the latest research on the German master. We publish an extract from a talk by Fritz Neumeyer at the beginning of the study days.

- Fritz Neumeyer

On the abstract landscape of the Barcelona Pavilion, there is only one single non-abstract object to be found. It is the statue of a female nude by Georg Kolbe, titled The Morning, which Mies chose to be perfectly placed on one edge of the patio, standing on a lower level in a small basin on a floor covered with black glass.

Stretching into the vertical, the statue is the only element to contrast the dominant horizontality of the pavilion’s architecture; and – what is more relevant for my argument – this statue is the only explicit anthropomorphic element within the architectural context of the pavilion. The statue is the counterpart to the abstract realm of architecture. It represents and substitutes the anthropomorphic presence that had disappeared from modern architecture in the process of its methodical geometric abstraction; furthermore, the statue stimulates the analogous reading of architectural elements in sculptural terms, so that both become complementary components of one spatial composition.

Being close neighbours within the space of the pavilion, the statue of the rising nude – idealising life and humanity as such – together with the freestanding onyx slab – idealising the wall as an essential architectural element and representing gravity as such – can act as analogous elements: in immediate proximity to the statue, the freestanding wall – liberated from its traditional physical function of bearing a load – can celebrate its modern autonomy and itself mutate into an abstract sculpture; and, vice versa, next to the freestanding wall, the statue of the rising nude can be read as an architectural analogy, expressing our own physical will to stand upright, carrying and balancing a load.