- Constant put Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion into the “framework of picturesque garden tradition.” She believes that Mies was in debt to the picturesque in this work, which provides a means to transcend the difficulty of the work. The main argument of this paper, though, in this work Mies revealed the possibility to transcend the decorative and sentimental limits of the modern garden and to recover its intrinsic value, without resort to mimes is, by reinstating its architectural essence” is bit stretch. But for her, the debt Mies owed to picturesque only resides the fact that Mies’s designed his building in a way that analogous to the approach to design landscape, or conceptually blurred the boundaries between these two fields.Constant contends that many of Mies’s contemporaries resorted to imagery from other sources, such as engineering, an expedient that bases its claim to valid on that discipline’s objective nature. However, for this objectivity derived from the assertion of difference rather than metaphorical similarities.As Michael Hays claims, in his “Critical Architecture between Culture and Form,” that Mies’s critical works presented “difference from other cultural manifestations and from a prior categories or methods.” Or, in Constant terms,“the meaning of Barcelona Pavilion is not conveyed through a priori formal logic or the representation of some external reality but is given to sensual and temporal experience. While immersed in the experience of Mies’s pavilion, the spectator is simultaneously distanced from it.”
- “Barcelona Pavilion… rejecting overt historical references, however, Mies undermined the object status of his structure. there are no facades in the traditional sense. the need for boundaries between inside and outside, functionally necessary in most buildings, does not pertain. thus the doors, positioned for security rather than to delimit threshold, were removed during exposition opening hours to preserve the spatial continuity. as a result, the Barcelona Pavilion is a labyrinth, a ‘montage of contradictory,perceptual facts’, its meaning is generated through the experience of a circuit that suggests parallels with those of the English landscape movement.”
- Constant alluded to two aspects of the creation of “post-perspectival” space in Mies’s work. First, she articulated the different approaches of Der Stijl and Mies. The former, even though both rejected means of pictorial perspective, sought a more “objective” or“abstract” way of presentation, exemplified by the axonometric diagram. Mies,on the other hand, goes beyond the mere rejection of perspective as a pictorial means of representation of 3-dimensional space by putting himself in a real three-dimensional model. He accorded primacy of the temporal experience in three-dimensional space, rather than to any “unified conception of the building.”Second, Mies views free-standing walls as a very important agent to control the visual sequence. In particular, Mies thwarted any possible extension of view in one direction. Rather, he devised a series of non-aligned, transverse walls, in order to limit visual expansion to the longitudinal dimension. In other words,he strived to compress the perception of spatial depth.
I would like to repeat my assertion, which is Mies does not see any boundary between building and garden, rather he sees them as part of an all-encompassing wholeness. In this case, it was the living community.(also see Tegethoff, 1985: 13)
LIYANG DING 