Final+project

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BARCELONA PAVILION It is located in Barcelona, Spain and it was built for the international exposition of 1929. Designed by Mies Van der Rohe, it completes, along with frank Lloyd Wright’s waterfall house, Villa Savoye from Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus building of Walter Gropius, the 4 most representative buildings of the modernist movement. It was demolished after the exposition only to be reconstructed years later because of its significance. The building is placed on a base of travertine marble that saves the slope of the ground. It also provides a space separated from the street for the building to be able to breathe and be apart from the noise of the street, placing it on a podium above the side walk. The access is a stair that takes the visitor to face an oblong reflecting pool that is placed in the left half of the base as well as a small building of services and a bench that is attached to a marble wall. In the right half, we find the main building, made to host the reception of the official opening of the german section of the exhibition. The whole construction has flat, clean lines and clear spaces and is simple. The low flat roof is supported by delicate metal supports. Leaving a free plant where design can be independent from structure The building has a classical serenity, the shape of the columns, makes it also light and elegant, having a x form they look thinner than they really are and the polished material reflects the surrounding colors making them almost invisible Being the structure completely based on the columns, the inside walls are placed only to modulate space, they dont have any structural purpose and mies used it to make the perspectives more interesting, the inside walls are made of different types of marble. In fact, the colors of the principal room where planned to remind the German flag, the yellow marble, the black rug and the red curtain frame the place where the reception took place. The walls that modulate space don’t close the building entirely, they that create a continuous flow of space, there is not a defined rute, the visitor can choose how to recognize the space but every perspective is controlled by walls and transparent and opaque glass. For example, we find the famous sculpture “Dawn” placed on the smaller of the two reflecting pools present on the pavilion, Mies made a long hallway, at the end of which light falls directly on the sculpture making it attractive to walk towards it and when the place of the sculptured is found, the visitor also discovers a whole new space open to the sky and from where is visible the main room of the building. The Barcelona pavilion is a tribute to modern architecture because It makes an exaltation of the principles of the new born modernist movement, clarity, simplicity and integrity.