The most influential building in Barcelona stood for about a year, and the one you can visit is legally a new building

There is a low building of glass, steel and stone at the bottom of Montjuïc, off to the side of the avenue, and most people walking up to the museum go straight past it.

It is, by a wide margin, the most influential piece of architecture in Barcelona. It is also, legally, about forty years old, and the paperwork that protects it says so in a sentence that most write-ups leave out.

Up for months, gone by 1930

Germany’s national pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition. Designed in 1928 at the German government’s commission, built in 1929.

And then taken down. The Ajuntament: el Pavelló va ser desmuntat el 1930. Elsewhere, more sharply: the original només va existir durant uns mesos — it existed for only a few months.

For fifty-six years there was nothing there. Every architect who spent the twentieth century arguing about this building was arguing about photographs.

The reconstruction opened on 2 June 1986.

The sentence in the heritage declaration

This is the part worth carrying around.

When the Generalitat listed the pavilion in 2003, it had to say what exactly it was listing. Its answer:

L’actual Pavelló Alemany no és ni una còpia ni una restauració sinó un nou edifici, obra arquitectònica final, que és el que s’ha considerat. El valor cultural és, en aquest cas, la suma del valor simbòlic i del valor arquitectònic del projecte.

Not a copy and not a restoration but a new building — and it is the new building that has been considered. Its cultural value is the symbolic value plus the architectural value of the project.

The architects’ college treats it the same way. The COAC keeps two separate entries: the 1929 pavilion, flagged as a vanished work, and Reconstrucció del Pavelló Alemany, 1981–1986, catalogued as a work in its own right with its own three authors.

So the building is on the original ground, from the original drawings, and both the register and the law say it is a different building. That is not a technicality; it is a genuinely interesting position about what a building is, and it is being taken by the institutions rather than by a critic.

Who designed it — and here the sources split

The standard credit is Mies van der Rohe. Two of our four institutions disagree with the standard credit.

The Ajuntament de Barcelona writes it flatly: the pavilion va ser projectat per Ludwig Mies van der Rohe i Lilly Reich. Its Montjuïc site says the same — the reconstruction of the pavilion that Mies van der Rohe i Lilly Reich van dissenyar.

The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana goes further, and names the erasure while it is at it. Reich, it says, was an essential collaborator from 1925, and amb Mies van der Rohe, Reich fou nomenada directora artística del pavelló alemany a Barcelona — followed by the parenthesis that does the work: bé que posteriorment l’edifici ha restat associat exclusivament al nom de l’arquitecte.

The COAC’s register lists one author: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The Generalitat’s legal declaration — the instrument that actually protects the building — describes un edifici projectat l’any 1928 per l’arquitecte Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and does not mention Reich at any point.

We are not going to resolve that, and we are not going to hide it either. The city’s current texts and the encyclopaedia credit two people; the professional register and the protective legal act credit one. Both are institutional, both are live, and if you are told a single confident answer on the spot, that answer is choosing a side.

The encyclopaedia adds one more fact that belongs here: in 2019 the foundation that runs the building created a Lilly Reich grant for gender equality in architecture, which is an institution acknowledging the problem in the most concrete way available to it.

The stones, and how many there are

Glass, steel, and stone that was extremely expensive for a building meant to last a summer.

The Generalitat names three: travertí romà, green Alpine marble, and onyx.

The Ajuntament names four, with origins: Roman travertine, green Alpine marble, ancient green marble from Greece, and golden onyx from the Atlas.

We give you four and tell you the fourth and the geography come from the city, because the legal text stops at three. The onyx is the one people photograph; it is the golden wall that changes as the light moves across it.

What it was for

A reception. The Ajuntament says the pavilion was conceived to house the official reception presided over by Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia alongside the German authorities.

This is where the most repeated anecdote in modern design comes from, and it needs one careful correction. The Barcelona chair was, in the encyclopaedia’s words, creada per al pavelló alemany de l’Exposició del 1929 — created for the pavilion. The Ajuntament confirms the same link.

What no institution we found says is that the chair was designed for the king and queen to sit in. The pavilion was for the reception; the chair was for the pavilion. Joining those two sentences into one is an inference, and it is everybody’s favourite inference about this building.

In the small pool stands «Alba», by Georg Kolbe, placed — in the city’s phrasing — so that the play of reflections multiplies its presence. The city’s photo archive files it under exactly that title, in the small pool. We have not found the German title on any institutional page, so we are not giving you one.

The reconstruction, and a story that circulates backwards

The move began with Oriol Bohigas, who pushed the initiative from the city’s planning department in 1980 and had Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos appointed to research, design and direct it. Project 1981, works from 1983, opening 1986.

But Bohigas had tried much earlier. The COAC records that in the nineteen-fifties he contacted Mies about rebuilding the Barcelona pavilion, and that Mies agreed and was willing to do it himself.

And here is the detail that gets retold inside out. In the same exchange Mies refused to authorise a reconstruction of his monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg — because that one would not respect its original site. The refusal was about Berlin, not about Barcelona. You will hear it told the other way round.

One naming error, twice

The Catalan version of the Ajuntament’s district page calls the 1929 event the Exposició Universal. The Spanish version of the same page calls it Exposición Internacional. The COAC even carries Exposició Universal de 1929 as an alternative name in its records.

The correct name is Exposició Internacional; Barcelona’s Universal Exposition was 1888, down in the Ciutadella. It is the same slip the city makes on the Magic Fountain’s history page, and it is how an error travels.

Seeing it

The pavilion has its own admission arrangements, which we do not print because they move. What is worth knowing before you decide:

It is small, and that is the point. People arrive expecting a monument and find a single-storey plan with eight columns, two pools and a set of free-standing walls. The building is an argument about space, not an object to be impressed by, and fifteen unhurried minutes inside it does more than an hour of reading.

It is right at the bottom. It sits beside the avenue below the museum, a couple of minutes from the Magic Fountain and about the same from CaixaForum in the old Casaramona factory. Those three are a compact hour before you go up the hill at all, and they are the only cluster on Montjuïc where you are not walking uphill between things.

It changes with the weather. Onyx, water and glass. On a grey day it is a different building, and nobody who has only seen the photographs knows that.

Where it sits in the fair

Everything on this slope is a survivor of the same event, and the survival was arbitrary. The Poble Espanyol was supposed to come down and did not. This pavilion was not supposed to come down and did. The whole lottery is the 1929 Exposition.

Our Montjuïc walking tour starts at the foot of the Venetian towers in Plaça d’Espanya and goes up through the fairground and the castle, told by an actor rather than recited. If you are still weighing whether the hill deserves the afternoon: is Montjuïc worth it.