Mies Van Der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion Analysis

As the literary critic Raymond Williams once said, ‘culture’ is ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. It has its roots in the Latin word ‘cultura,’ which—derived from the root word ‘colere’— meant ‘cultivation’ with regard to things such as animals and crops, and retained this meaning when it passed into English in the early fifteenth century. However, in the early sixteenth century, ‘culture’ began to be used metaphorically to refer to the cultivation of the mind, evident in the following sentence written by Samuel Johnson in a short paper of 1752: ‘she neglected the culture of her understanding.’ From the late eighteenth century onwards, this second definition began to overtake the first as being the commonly

To explain this idea, one can apply it to a subject such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, a building completed in 1929 to serve as the venue of the opening ceremony of the Exposició Internacional de Barcelona of that year (Cohen, 1996, p. 50). An example of Modernist architecture, the pavilion comprises two semi-enclosed, covered spaces—constructed from flat, unembellished walls of glass, marble, onyx and travertine—that are positioned within a walled, rectangular space occupied by a rectangular pool of water (Cohen, p. 52). As the art historian Anne Massey writes, this design bespeaks the Modernist desire to do away with the vulgar, bourgeois designs associated with the pre-WWI period, and, instead, to offer up a ‘bright new future’ through ‘hygienic, plain, and stark’ visions that have come to be recognised for their ‘primacy’ within the history of design (Massey, p.

Firstly, by comparing the paintings of Jean‐Michel Basquiat Basquiat and Thomas Kinkade, one may come to see that the possession of a profound emotional quality should, rightly, elevate those objects that hold this over those that do not. Secondly, if one is not assessing something on the basis of its emotionality, one can assess it on the basis of its aesthetic refinement, as is proven when one looks to the cases of the Barcelona Pavilion and Trump Tower. Finally, another method that one may use to gauge cultural value is by questioning a subject’s intellectual strength, an approach demonstrated through the comparison between the sophisticated creations of Miuccia Prada and the boorish products of Philip