The Journal of Architecture ISSN: 1360-2365 (Print) 1466-4410 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20 Book reviews To cite this article: (2006) Book reviews, The Journal of Architecture, 11:2, 269-276, DOI: 10.1080/13602360600787173 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602360600787173 Published online: 17 Feb 2007. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 72 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjar20 269 The Journal of Architecture Volume 11 Number 2 Book reviews Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion By George Dodds Routledge, 2005 ISBN 0 415 32523 4, £22.50 Paperback, 200pp. with illustrations. Most architectural historians, theorists and critics would not deny that the business of researching buildings is a tricky one. The reasons are obvious: buildings are altered or deteriorate over time or may never have been well documented in the first place, confounding even the most diligent scholar’s attempts to understand an architect’s aesthetic intentions and creative process. Lack of an extant building or of documents can also confound architectural scholars’ attempts to reconstruct the experience of a building. Nonetheless, as George Dodds points out in Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion, that has not stopped many from trying. Building Desire is a timely work. It engages not with Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, but with a set of canonical images of the Pavilion— sixteen prints of fourteen views of the structure by the Berliner Bild-Bericht company—and traces how these, along with a small handful of first-hand accounts, have affected scholarly interpretations of the building since its opening in May, 1929 and demolition seven months later. Dodds also notes that, in the absence of drawings of the original Pavilion ‘as-built’, these prints also shaped the reconstruction of the Pavilion by Cristian Cirici, Fernanda Ramos, and Ignazi de Sola-Morales in 1986. Dodds’s aims in producing this work are multifold. At the most basic level, he is intent on pointing out the factual errors and interpretative muddles which # 2006 The Journal of Architecture have accumulated over time in the ‘mythography’ of the Barcelona Pavilion and of Mies. These range from the use by Juan Pablo Bonta and others of an inaccurate plan of the Pavilion by Werner Blaser to what Dodds sees as the unconvincing but commonly held assertion of the structure’s site-specificity. Dodds argues that this catalogue of misattributions and inconsistencies has occurred because in dealing with the Pavilion scholars have access to so little of the evidence which typically guides architectural research—plans, elevations, sections, drawings, axonometric views, briefs, or the original building itself. Although a few writers, notably Philip Johnson, Peter Blake, or Blaser, were close to Mies, he refused to shed light on key aspects of the Pavilion’s construction or even to correct errors when he surely knew of them; one example is that Blaser produced his inaccurate plan of the Pavilion in 1964 while under Mies’s supervision. (Mies then gave Blaser his blessing to reproduce the plan in the first edition of Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure.) What scholars do have are the Berliner BildBericht photographs. Consequently, these images have lain at the origins of most existing interpretations of the Pavilion and, Dodds believes, coloured discussions of Mies’s oeuvre and the foundations of the Modern Movement itself. However, little is actually known about these influential black-and-white prints. The original glass negatives are missing and presumed destroyed. It is not known who took them. Nor is it known who subsequently cropped and painted over several of the prints in MoMA’s Mies van der Rohe Collection (which contains the most complete and frequently reproduced set of 1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360600787173 270 Book reviews prints), but, given that they came from Mies himself, Dodds presumes he or someone in his office had some hand in the process. One thing is certain: the photographs are exceptional works of art. Yet several generations of Mies scholars have treated them as if they are straightforward documents of the Pavilion’s architecture and of its experience, using them to re-create imaginary walks-through of its spaces and to describe its spatial effects. In this overlaying of the photographic image onto real space, Dodds sees the collective desire to occupy the space of the original Barcelona Pavilion which, ambiguous, surreal, labyrinthine, he equates with the space of modernity. This is the desire of which the book’s title speaks and, like most desires, can never be fulfilled. Unrealisable or not, however, desires have consequences. In this instance, Dodds argues that this persistent and mostly tacit conflation of the photographic image with physical space has meant that it is questionable whether or not one can distinguish in a meaningful way between photographs of the Pavilion and the original Pavilion structure itself. And, certainly, it appears that most scholars have not really attempted to do so—nor, Dodds notes, do they now distinguish between the photographs, the 1929 Pavilion, and its 1986 reconstruction. Critics repeatedly discuss the Pavilion’s spatial effects without clarifying or, perhaps, without realising, that they are actually commenting on photographic effects. As an example, Dodds analyses how Wolf Tegethoff’s reading of grainy black-and-white images leads him to conclude that the foliage and the texture of the courtyard wall are similar—a conclusion which supports his argument that the Pavilion strongly relates to its site—whereas those who have seen colour photographs or visited the reconstructed Pavilion in person find the opposite. Dodds notes other instances where interpretations of the Pavilion changed when it was no longer seen in black-andwhite. Attempting to explain Mies’s choice of colours—black carpet, red curtain, gold wall, the colours of the Weimar flag—led certain critics to read the Pavilion as a political statement. However, Dodds’s own interest in the Pavilion’s use of colour, particularly its red curtain, takes him in a different direction; he speculates that Mies, who was well versed in expressionist set design (for instance, the convention of using bright colours to produce neatly blended greys), made his selection of colours and materials with an eye towards how the Pavilion would photograph in black-and-white. Dodds’s speculations about colour support a contention at this book’s heart: that Mies was always more concerned with the Pavilion’s photographic record than with the Pavilion’s architecture. Rather than being the modern architect most attentive to materials and construction, Dodds argues, Mies should be recognised as the Modern Movement’s most masterful manipulator of images. To support his assertion, Dodds points to Mies’s lack of interest in preserving the Pavilion when the opportunity arose or in correcting facts about the Pavilion’s construction, layout and materials. In short, Dodds says, Mies was happy for writers to rely upon the Berliner Bild-Bericht prints for information about the Pavilion because these images ultimately came closer to the spirit of the building than the building ever did itself; carefully staged, cropped, and altered, the prints shared none of the built work’s imperfections. (Due 271 The Journal of Architecture Volume 11 Number 2 to financial and time constraints, the original Pavilion was by necessity crudely done and not built to last, with a cheaply constructed steel-framed roof and an unevenly plastered ceiling among other details.) Despite the skill with which Dodds makes his case, his discussion of Mies’s intentions and attitudes does not always convince, possibly because the Mies he presents shifts over the course of the book: at times, Mies’s conscious manipulation of images and of people is attributed to his hunger for fame (which comes at the expense of his collaborator, Lilly Reich); at others, these same manipulations are attributed to Mies’s philosophy of truth in architecture where ‘if the image of the work adequately reproduced his idea, it was, for him, true’ [p. 129]. Moreover, incisive as it is, the author’s analysis of the sixteen Berliner Bild-Bericht prints and of the many histories which rely upon them is unlikely permanently to do away with the mythography surrounding the Pavilion, not least because it is these very myths that have made it such a provocation for other artists, architects, and architectural writers in the first place. As Dodds puts it: ‘The Berliner Bild-Bericht prints do not document a building; they anticipate an architecture’ [p. 89]. Dodds is too perceptive an historian not to realise that, without its myths, the Pavilion would not be such a potent repository for collective desire. He also knows that, underneath the layers of myths, there is no longer an ‘authentic’ Pavilion to recover. With these insights, his attempts to deconstruct the Pavilion’s mythology take on a certain—not unfitting— ambivalence. Dodds comes out much more strongly in his critique of architectural methodology—and this may well be the book’s most distinctive scholarly contribution. While the degree to which the Pavilion’s reputation depends on photography may be extreme, it is by no means unique. Its example throws up some germane questions about how photography and, by extension, other forms of twodimensional representation, are used within architectural scholarship. Dodds is particularly troubled by the way in which architectural researchers habitually conflate photographic with built space, arguing that by smoothing over the difference, architecture becomes a simulacrum, as the original Pavilion has itself. He states: ‘It is one thing to recognise [ . . . ] that an event may be a prop for its own representation in another medium; it is quite another to offer up a representation as evidentiary of the event’s facticity’ [p. 7]. This is a significant point, one which may seem obvious. But working out how to counter this tendency is far less obvious as it is so deeply embedded. It is generally assumed that architectural researchers, mostly trained architects, are able to ‘read’ two-dimensional representations spatially. It is this skill which sets architectural historians apart from historians in other disciplines—the architectural historians’ version of einfühlen 1—allowing them effectively to step into any given building in their mind’s eye; to move through its rooms; to recreate an architect’s creative process; and to reconstruct his and occasionally her aesthetic intentions. Yet, as the case of the Pavilion demonstrates, such visual evidence tends to be read factually, for what it can reveal about a building, without the specificity of the media being taken into account. While Dodds’s primary concern is photography, the 272 Book reviews problem his case study raises is actually broader. With the growing interest in considering how buildings are consumed as well as how they are produced, the possibilities for what constitutes evidence within architectural history have expanded in recent years to embrace literature, film, and experiential narratives. Yet what is the status of such non-architectural documentation? And how should it be interpreted by architectural researchers? These are questions which are only beginning to be asked within the architectural discipline. By way of an initial reply, Dodds calls upon scholars to underscore the difference between the building and the image in order to reattach value to each. More intriguingly, he suggests that modern architectural scholars—as representatives of a discipline bound up with the making of images—should see it as part of their responsibility to keep a critical eye on both the production and consumption of images. With this proposition, scholars would find themselves at work in an expanded field of architectural knowledge where each form of evidence has its own history, context and effects. One finishes Dodds’s book with the hope that the possibilities of such a shift will be a subject of strong debate in coming years. Barbara Penner The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK Note 1. Einfühlen was used by Johann Gottfried Heider in the eighteenth century to describe the ability to enter, inhabit and feel oneself into other time. Mies van der Rohe: The Krefeld Villas By Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer Princeton Architectural Press, 2005 ISBN 1-56898-503-7, £25.00 Hardback, 144pp. with illustrations. Following up their key monograph Villa Müller: A Work of Adolf Loos (PAP, 1994), Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer deliver an equally meticulous study of two villas which are little known within Mies’s oeuvre. The Krefeld villas, Haus Lange, and its neighbour, and variant, Haus Esters, were constructed between 1927 and 1930 for two wealthy industrialists, Hermann Lange and Josef Esters, in the suburbs of Krefeld, then a major centre for Germany textile industries close to the Dutch border. With their discretely articulated, albeit extensive windows, cellular plan and brick exterior surfaces, the villas sit somewhat awkwardly in relation to Mies’s work at this time. Given that his seminal works, the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat, were completed in 1929 and 1930 respectively, we might imagine that the Krefeld villas represent the end of an earlier tendency in his work, one superseded by the sort of clarity of material and spatial purpose visible in Barcelona and Brno. Why, then, do these villas deserve a monograph? The topic of the study is not so much the villas as the Miesian oeuvre itself. The villas are analysed as a way of interpreting how the figure and legacy of Mies has been constructed. Thus the aim at the outset seems not to be a recuperation of the villas and a claim for their centrality, but rather the use of their very marginality as a point of leverage