The timely disappearance of Mies van der Rohe's ^[1] German Pavilion less than a year after its creation opened up more than 30 years of speculation, hypothesising and creative remembering. The lost Pavilion serves as the prototype for the actual Pavilion, an object/space of theory and discourse that has developed around the 1929 project.

Projection

We still build. We build mean houses with low windows resentful of light. An architect can be judged by his fenestration; let it be grand, profligate, various, bold. No, his windows are as regular as clipboards, dull as computer screens, we have no architects now, we have little men who like to simulate. Smart models, they call it, and it has nothing to do with long-legged ladies with degrees, those are still avoided after hours in favour of the dumb kind. No, smart models are a way of constructing the building on a three-dimensional screen. A Virtual Model allows me a tour of the building before the first navvy gets out his spade.^[2]

Constructed on a three dimensional screen, the virtual representation of the Pavilion is not a simulation, not a model, but rather a mixture of creation and exploration, a study of light, material space and theories. An interpretation to develop an understanding of the history of the Pavilion's interpretations.

Interpretation

...architecture, as distinct from building, is an interpretive, critical act. It has a linguistic condition different from the practical one of building. A building is interpreted when its rhetorical mechanism and principles are revealed. This analysis may be performed in a number of different ways, according to the forms of different types of discourse; among these are theory, criticism, history, and manifesto. An act of interpretation is also present in the different modes of representational discourse: drawing, writing, model making, and so on. Interpretation is also integral to the act of projecting.^[3]

Glass, water, marble, steel and the reflective surfacing of glossy magazines, collective reflection of two generations of architectural theorists has split and multiplied the initial project, confounding history with an array of virtualies and cloaking the Pavilion in myth.

Reflection

Mirrors can destroy coherence, but they can also reveal it. ... [Reflected images in the Barcelona Pavilion] restore a secret that has been erased from the tangible form of the building.^[4]

The Museum of Modern Art's (New York) reconstruction (1986 in Barcelona on the original site) is an attempt to lay the discursive Pavilion to rest through the authority of built form, a mausoleum.

The virtual reconstruction propagates the Pavilion in its natural environment, the evolving swirl of information.