Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, built for that city’s 1929 International Exhibition, has been celebrated for its elegant use of stainless steel, marble and glass. But what were the environmental consequences of Mies’s material choices? For the next 10 days, visitors to the pavilion (which was dismantled in 1930 and recreated in the 1980s) will be forced to consider that question, thanks to an installation that mimics, hugs and overlooks Mies’s masterwork but is made entirely of timber—specifically, cross-laminated timber (CLT) from Galician forests. They’ll also get to see a flamenco dancer perform on a CLT stage in Mies’s reflecting pool.
Alan Organschi, a Yale architecture professor and partner in the New Haven firm Gray Organschi Architecture, worked with Vicente Guallart and Daniel Ibañez of Institute for Advanced Architecture in Catalonia (IAAC) on the design of the pavilion. Organschi, who said his goal was to promote “the use of buildings as a global carbon sink,” also worked with a team from Bauhaus Earth (a Berlin-based network of researchers that he has helped found while on leave from Yale) to perform a life cycle analysis (LCA) for each component of Mies’s building and for equivalent components made of timber.
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