The Flatness of Representation
30 June 2008
Mies Van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion Interior Perspective, 1928©2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
I’ll open the log with this fascinating montage from Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. The level to which this drawing reveals both Mies’ intention and his investigation of space is a one time clarity of process that I wish I could find for so many other projects.
The radical nature of the drawing is how Mies describes space. He places general elements around the empty plane of the drawing without a ground or ceiling. The ground plane, arguably the basis from where architecture is experienced, is not there. Its absence in a drawing meant to relay an experience of architecture is a clear shift away from the issues painters had experienced in portraying realistic foreshortening of the ground previous to the invention of perspective. In this drawing, the most important plane is the drawing itself – the plane from which space is experienced. By removing the representation of the ground, Mies separates the difference between the experience of a representational drawing, and the experience of the thing itself. What the ground is in architecture, the image plane is in a drawing.
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