IT’S NOT ON A PLINTH

The Barcelona Pavilion is not on a raised plinth.  I mentioned this on the previous page.

Yet architects are taught and indoctrinated that indeed the building is on a raised plinth.  To add veracity to this assertion, I started poking around on the web and in the architecture history books that I have.

First up are these two passages that was posted on ArchDaily, which is a popular architectural website.

“Raised on a plinth of travertine, the Barcelona Pavilion separates itself from its context to create atmospheric and experiential effects that seem to occur in a vacuum that dissolves all consciousness of the surrounding city.”

“By raising the pavilion on a plinth in conjunction with the narrow profile of the site, the Barcelona Pavilion has a low horizontal orientation that is accentuated by the low flat roof that appears to float over both the interior as well as the exterior.”

link to the archdaily article here

If I had not visited the building last week, I would have considered the above sentences gospel.  But it is not true!  The Barcelona Pavilion is cut into a sloping site.  Mies had two choices;  he could have done what he did by raising one side of the base.  Or he could have cut the building walls into the slope.

And because he chose the former, the back of the plinth is flush with the ground.  Again, the back of the building, as the above photograph shows, is flush with the ground.

The Parthanon in Athens is on a raised base.  Sculptures are placed on plinths.  A plinth is defined as a lower square slab at the base of a column.  In these examples, you can walk around the object, and the base is the same height on all sides.  That is a plinth.

And since the Barcelona Pavilion does not do that, I find it architecturally immoral for folks to describe it as if it is sitting solitary in the landscape on a raised base.

Going thru a few architectural history books, I found this.

“Mies van der Rohe envisaged a glass and steel temple on a podium – a sort of shrine to German art. ”  This is the text of Curtis in his book Modern Architecture since 1900.  This is the architectural history text that we used in school.  And as you can see, he states that the building is on a podium.  The rest of the paragraph describes the offset columns and the floating roof.  But it never addresses the site and the fact that it slopes and that there is not a podium on the other three sides.  2.  p308.

Norberg-Schulz, in Meaning in Western Architecture, does not mention the plinth.

Blaser, Werner, in Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure, does not mention the plinth or the site.

Nothing that I am saying here detracts from the masterpiece that is the Barcelona Pavilion.  All of the descriptions of the free and floating plan are accurate.  All of the descriptions of the circular nature of the way you circulate thru the building are true.  All of the descriptions in which either time stops or you are at either the beginning or the end of time are true.

Yet all of these descriptions could be so much richer if they would describe the sensation of circulating along the back of the building next to the ivy, vs circulating along the front of the building, where if you fell off the plinth, you would hurt yourself.  Or they might describe the way the building integrates with the landscape on one side, thereby pulling the verdant landscape into the building experience.

Or they might acknowledge that architects have to deal with sloping sites all the time.  And wouldn’t it be a much richer story if the perfection of the Barcelona Pavilion was achieved on a sloping site?

And as faithful readers know by now, our cultural plinth mis-understanding of the Barcelona Pavilion is a direct result of our representative and flashcard visual mindset.  A transparent mindset makes the fact that the building is on a sloping site inescapable.  And it fosters a far more accurate image of the true dynamics of this icon.

2.  Curtis, William J.R.  Modern Architecture since 1900.  Prentice-Hall, Inc.:  Englewood Cliffs, NJ.  1983.