Barcelona Pavilion Case Study: Plan, Materials and the 1986 Rebuild (Mies van der Rohe)

The Barcelona Pavilion was Germany's national pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. It stood for less than a year and was taken down in 1930. The building you can walk through on Montjuïc today is a reconstruction finished in 1986. This case study keeps the two apart.

If this is for a studio or thesis case study, our guide on how to document a building sets out what a jury expects.

Who designed the Barcelona Pavilion, and for whom

The Fundació Mies van der Rohe describes the pavilion as the work of Mies and Lilly Reich, built from glass, steel and several kinds of stone, and conceived to hold the official reception led by King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia with the German authorities. Reich was not an assistant: in 1928 she was named artistic director of the German section, the same post Mies held. Together they designed the Barcelona chair for this building, and it is still made today.

The brief was thin. Clare Newton of the University of Melbourne, in a 2003 ACSA conference paper, records that the pavilion was added to the exposition plans late and that there was scarcely a brief beyond a request for "not too much glass". She also cites the historian Wolf Tegethoff: work was suspended in February 1929 because costs had risen sharply. The pavilion was then built in what Newton calls a frenzied three months.

Writing in ArchDaily in 2015, Adam Jasper quotes an official statement attributed to President Paul von Hindenburg: in the new Germany "everything is open, nothing is concealed". Keep that line in mind for the structure.

Site and context

The pavilion sits within the exposition grounds on Montjuïc. Newton, drawing on the reconstruction architects' own account, says the site first offered to Mies was next to the French pavilion and that he chose another one. The ground slopes. The travertine podium makes a flat plane over it, and its uneven outline, which the 1929 publicity plan simplified, makes sense only once you see the slope: the front stands above the ground, the side walls run down to meet it, and at the rear the floor is level with the natural ground.

The 1929 photographs are cropped. Newton points out that the sides and rear were rarely shown, because budget cuts left those walls in rendered, painted brick. For period views, see the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona's 1929 exposition gallery.

Concept: a pavilion without rooms

The building, its stone and its furniture were the display. Jasper describes the columns as a grid of points holding the roof while the walls were placed freely, guiding movement rather than closing off rooms. The Fundació puts the point about materials this way: Mies's originality lay less in new materials than in the rigour of the geometry, the precision of the pieces and the clarity of how they were put together.

The one artwork is a bronze reproduction of Georg Kolbe's Dawn, set at the end of the small pool. The Fundació notes that it is reflected in the water, the marble and the glass, so it seems to multiply as you move. The scheme evolved: Newton, citing the Mies van der Rohe Archive, says one preliminary scheme had no columns and another had six.

Barcelona Pavilion floor plan and zoning

Read the plan as a sequence of zones on one raised floor. You climb the steps from the plaza onto an open travertine terrace with the large pool, framed by a long travertine wall with a bench and a small service annex in the corner. Next comes the roofed core: a flat roof on eight cruciform steel columns, with free-standing walls of marble, onyx and glass slid beneath it. At the far end is a second, smaller pool enclosed by walls, where the Kolbe figure stands. The route bends at every wall and never runs straight.

Which plan should you trust?

Newton compares the three plans most books use. The 1929 publication plan simplified the wall widths and the podium. A plan drawn in Mies's Chicago office in the mid-1960s for Werner Blaser added furniture and a uniform grid of about one metre, and wrongly showed the roof running over the whole sculpture pool. Tegethoff published a more accurate plan in 1981. The travertine shop drawing shows a changing module, so do not assume a one-metre grid.

None of the sources we opened state dimensions, so our diagram has none. For the measured layout, use the plan published on the Fundació's pavilion page. Newton also notes that the original drawings are in the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Section and structure: the cruciform columns

It looks like a thin roof on eight slim columns, with walls that carry nothing. Newton shows otherwise. Construction photographs show bolted plates and girders hidden inside chrome sleeves or within the roof, and deep beams in the roof tapered down to the thin edge seen in the photographs. The eight columns could not carry the roof alone. Quoting the architect Sandra Honey, she records that five more columns were lodged inside the double-skinned marble walls. The podium was built on shallow Catalan brick vaults, a conventional local technique.

No original section drawings exist. The sections in many books were drawn later by Sergius Ruegenberg, who worked on the original, and Newton warns that they may be idealised rather than a record of what was built. Any section you find is an interpretation.

The cruciform column is not the most efficient shape. Cristian Cirici told Newton that a circular hollow section would carry load better. Frank Lloyd Wright, she notes, suggested Mies get rid of what he called ridiculous little columns. In Newton's reading, their job is partly to mark where the main ceremony took place and to give order to a flowing space. Even the familiar column cross-section drawn in 1964 for Blaser is listed as incorrect in the published Mies archive.

Barcelona Pavilion materials used

The Fundació lists the four stones used in the reconstruction, all of the same kind and origin as Mies's in 1929: Roman travertine, green Alpine marble, ancient green marble from Greece, and golden onyx from the Atlas Mountains. Travertine covers the podium and forms the long bench beside the large pool; the marbles and the onyx are cut into thin, polished wall plates, which Jasper describes running from green marble to golden onyx. With them came glass in several tints and chrome-clad steel.

The glass was harder. Tegethoff argued that the green glass between the ceremonial space and the sculpture pool is now too transparent. Cirici told Newton they found a Czechoslovak maker who could reproduce the old plate glass, but it cost too much.

Element	1929 original	1986 reconstruction
Roof	Light steel, asphalt felt, lath-and-plaster ceiling painted white	Reinforced concrete with an upward camber and concealed drainage
Column cladding	Chrome	Highly polished stainless steel
Floor	Travertine on brick vaults; poor drainage	Stronger, more compact travertine on a slab laid to a fall
Office annex	Service rooms; rendered brick; no photographs survive	Stone outside, timber panelling inside; now the visitor hub
Below the floor	Brick vaults over the slope	A basement for plant and storage

Table compiled from Newton (2003), who draws on the reconstruction architects' book, and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe.

Light, climate and services

Carlos Pesqueira Calvo, in a 2025 paper in the European Public and Social Innovation Review, describes how filtering and diffusing devices soften the Mediterranean light so the stone is seen under even light, while its reflections blur the line between inside and outside. The deep overhang also shades the glass (our observation).

The original roof did not cope with rain: Newton says the pavilion was awash whenever it rained. Services were kept out of sight. Joseph Fujikawa, who worked in Mies's office, remembered Mies saying the small structure at the back existed only because the pavilion needed running water. The rebuild added a basement. According to Dezeen's 2013 report on Andrés Jaque's installation PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society, it was made as a hidden storage and maintenance room, hard to reach on purpose.

The 1986 reconstruction

The Fundació gives the sequence. In 1980 Oriol Bohigas, head of urban planning at Barcelona City Council, started the project and appointed Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos. Work began in 1983 and the pavilion opened on its original site in 1986. Dezeen notes that the team worked largely from black and white photographs.

Some evidence came out of the ground. Cirici told Newton that the old foundations were found during excavation, confirming the size of the building and letting the team correct a placement error of about 30 mm in each direction. A piece of a cruciform column and its fixing to the footing turned up too, and the column angles were corrected from 8 mm to 10 mm thick. No photographs of the office survive, so the team took its layout from the first published plan and its timber detailing from Mies's later interiors. Newton also records that Philip Johnson urged Cirici to build the podium to the idealised published outline.

Reception: then and now

The reconstruction architects, Newton notes, counted twenty favourable reviews in the official diary of the 1929 exposition. Rem Koolhaas, writing in Mies in America (2001) and quoted by Newton, put the cost of the rebuild bluntly: "Through its resurrection, its aura was killed." Franz Schulze, in his notes to the published Mies archive, judged the rebuild as close to the original as new materials allowed. Arquitectura Viva, marking thirty years in 2016, said the project was not free of controversy or problems of interpretation.

Temporary interventions double as criticism. Jaque's 2012 to 2013 installation brought the basement's contents upstairs, including broken glass from attempts to match the original tint, worn chair cushions and cracked travertine. In November 2017 Anna and Eugeni Bach covered the stone in white vinyl for Mies Missing Materiality, which Dezeen reported they described as turning the pavilion into "a 1:1 scale mock-up" of itself.

What designers in India can take from it

These are our reading, not claims from the sources.

1. Design the drainage before the thin edge. The 1929 roof flooded; the 1986 roof needed a camber, hidden drainage and a floor laid to a fall. If you want a knife-edge flat roof in Mumbai or Kochi, draw the falls, outlets and overflows in section first and let the edge follow. A slab that reads thin can still be deep where nobody looks.
2. Treat stone as a design decision, not a finish. The rebuild matched stone by type and origin, and a 1929 shop drawing laid out the travertine slab by slab. On an Indian job, name the quarry, see the actual lot, and lay out book-matched panels before cutting. Our guide to Kota, sandstone, granite and marble covers the local options.
3. Record what you actually build. The pavilion was rebuilt from photographs and footings because no true sections existed, and wrong plans circulated for decades. Hand over as-built drawings, including the hidden structure. See the drawing set every client should receive.
4. Give the services a home. The open plan works because water, storage and plant sit in an annex and a basement. In an Indian house, plan the pump room, tank, store and utility as one servant zone so the living spaces can stay open.

If you are choosing a thesis direction from this, our list of B.Arch thesis topics by typology includes civic and cultural briefs. Our Farnsworth House case study, coming in this series, follows the eight-column idea into Mies's later work.

Visiting the Barcelona Pavilion

The Fundació's visitor page (accessed 3 Nov 2026) lists the address as Av. Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia 7. It is open every day except 25 December, from 10:00 to 20:00 between March and October and 10:00 to 18:00 between November and February, The nearest metro is Espanya (L1, L3). The page prints general entry at €9, with a reduced rate for students and free entry on the first Sunday of each month. In November 2026 an installation causes some closures and from 12 to 22 November entry is by advance ticket only, so check before you go. Professional photography and filming need the Fundació's permission.

Want to see how architects in India handle open plans, stone and light today? Browse projects by MOA members.

FAQ

When was the Barcelona Pavilion built?

It was designed in 1928 and 1929 and built in about three months for the exposition, opening on 27 May 1929. It was dismantled in 1930. The present building was reconstructed between 1983 and 1986 on the original site.

Who designed the Barcelona Pavilion?

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. Reich was artistic director of the German section of the exposition alongside Mies, and the two designed the Barcelona chair for the pavilion. The 1986 reconstruction was by Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos.

What materials were used in the Barcelona Pavilion?

Glass, steel and four stones: Roman travertine, green Alpine marble, ancient green marble from Greece and golden onyx from the Atlas Mountains. The 1929 podium sat on brick vaults; the 1986 version has a concrete roof and stainless steel column cladding.

Is the Barcelona Pavilion today the original building?

No. The original was taken down in 1930. What stands now is the 1986 reconstruction, built from photographs, surviving drawings and the old footings, with changes to the roof, drainage, cladding and services.

Where can I find the Barcelona Pavilion floor plan with dimensions?

Use the plan published by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe on its pavilion page, and the drawings in the Mies van der Rohe Archive at MoMA. Be careful with plans copied between books: several contain known errors.

Sources

• Fundació Mies van der Rohe: The Pavilion (history, reconstruction, stones, Lilly Reich, Kolbe, plan) (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Fundació Mies van der Rohe: General information (address, hours, tickets, photography) (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Clare Newton, University of Melbourne: The Barcelona Pavilion: Real and Imagined, 91st ACSA International Conference, Helsinki, 2003 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• ArchDaily, Adam Jasper: A Virtual Look Into Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion, 18 Sep 2015 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• ArchDaily, Gabriela Zuleta: Architecture Classics: Barcelona Pavilion, 11 Oct 2023 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Arquitectura Viva: Barcelona Pavilion, 30 Years Later, 31 Aug 2016 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Ajuntament de Barcelona, Barcelona Cultura: The history of the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, 31 Aug 2016 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona: Exposició Internacional de 1929 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Dezeen, Amy Frearson: PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society by Andrés Jaque, 4 Jan 2013 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Dezeen, Amy Frearson: Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion loses its marble walls, 9 Nov 2017 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Carlos Pesqueira Calvo: El color natural en el Pabellón de Barcelona de Mies van der Rohe, European Public and Social Innovation Review, vol. 10, 2025 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)