Mies's Opaque Cube: The Electric Utilities Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition focuses on the dramatic, opaque, white cube-shaped building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the German electricity industry's display at the exposition. Like many emblematic projects of modern architecture, the pavilion was created for a temporary exhibition and is known only through the photographic and graphic documentation of the era. Mies used the Electricity Supply Company Pavilion to experiment with a variety of ideas, including the use of photo murals and a new expression of structure and space, that featured in his later buildings. Through archival research, Laura Lizondo Sevilla has reconstructed this pavilion, the original plans for which no longer exist, and her article reinterprets the building's contribution to Mies's subsequent architecture.
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June 2017
Research Article|
June 01 2017
Mies's Opaque Cube: The Electric Utilities Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition
Laura Lizondo Sevilla
Laura Lizondo Sevilla
Universitat Politècnica de València
Laura Lizondo Sevilla has degrees from the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain, where she has taught since 2008. She has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University (2011) and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2015). She is managing editor of En Blanco: Revista de Arquitectura. Her current research examines British “plateglass universities” of the 1960s. [email protected]
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2017) 76 (2): 197–217.
Citation
Laura Lizondo Sevilla; Mies's Opaque Cube: The Electric Utilities Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 June 2017; 76 (2): 197–217. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2017.76.2.197
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