Standing in the Shadows


Standing in the Shadows

Gill Matthewson

INTERSTICES 4 Standing in the Shadows 1

I

In the call for papers for this symposium, a worker’s
tool kit and a courtesan’s reticule are cited to
illustrate the difference between accessory as useful
and as ornament. Presumably the courtesan’s reticule
is that which is ornamental and the worker’s tool kit
is useful. And yet ... a tool kit might be carefully
aged to give an illusion of experience and a reticule
might contain condoms. So who can say which type
of accessory is more necessary to the work or even
the very survival of the person that carries it.

There are two things that interest me in this
illustration, one is the inherent crude polarisation of
gender: a woman and her accessories are decorative
a n d  a  m a n  a n d  h i s  a r e  u s e f u l .  Although the text
speaks of there being no sense in privileging either of
these positions, it exists. What also interests me is the
notion that an accessory carries with it an idea of
identity. Can a worker be a worker without tools
and can a sex worker survive without condoms? It
seems that accessories are more than either just useful
or ornamental but are integral to survival, legitimacy
and identity.

Thus, accessories within accessories give clues. And so
I want to access this notion of theory as accessory to
architecture by combining these two interests and
conducting a parallel investigation into another
accessory: woman. In particular the way she has
been accessorised in a certain building: the Barcelona
Pavilion (fig 1). First built in 1929 for the Barcelona
International Exhibition but demolished soon after, the
regard for both the pavilion and its architect, Mies
van der Rohe, was such that it was reconstructed in
1986.

II

I find myself in an odd position here because when I
speak of woman I also have to speak as a woman. I
cannot separate the accessorising of woman within
architecture from my own search for survival,
legitimacy and identity in this same world. They are
entwined. And this search for a place in the world
of architecture has been shadowed by a force that
has constantly marginalised me and other women.

I  b e g a n  w i t h  a  s e a r c h  f o r  r o l e  m o d e l s .  I  u s e d  to

collect the names of women architects as some kind
of evidence that before myself and my
contemporaries there were others. They were the
n a m e s  o f  w o m e n  w h o  i n  e a r l i e r  d a y s  h a d  t o  f i g h t
society’s stricture that married women did not work
and so practised in partnership with their husbands.
But her name would slip under his and not be seen
again. Or women who chose career over family and
never married. They were rarities, oddities and
therefore unable to be classified. Or women whose
interest in architecture was propelled by a middle
class concern with helping the ‘less privileged,’ work
firmly rooted in the domestic realm and so deemed
of interest only to sociologists not to those compiling
histories of architecture. Or women involved as
patrons who supported, encouraged and guided the
building of architecture.

One such name is that of Lilly Reich, Mies van der
Rohe’s seldom acknowledged collaborator. She is a
shadowy figure, existing almost exclusively in the
margins and footnotes of books, between the lines,
and in the lapses and discrepancies of accounts of
Mies’ life and work. It is, however, a strong shadow.
I believe that someone of importance cast it.

Lilly and Mies met sometime in the mid-twenties and
in 1926 she moved her studio to Berlin from
Frankfurt. Most historians mark this move as being
the beginning of their collaboration

1
 which lasted

until Mies emigrated to the States in 1938. This
period includes the Barcelona Pavilion. That Lilly
Reich has impacted on the work of Mies can not be
denied.

Prior to working with Lilly, Mies was foundering
badly in his attempts to translate his theoretical ideas
of the early twenties into built form. Even as sketch
designs the individual theoretical works are neither
complete nor consistent. The 1923 Brick Country
House, for instance, has plans and perspectives that
are impossible to match up. With his first commission
for a built modern work, the Dexel House, obtained
in early 1925, Mies failed to progress further than a
couple of small vague preliminary sketches.

2
 Mies’

procrastination was legendary: “chronic dilatoriness
and indecision [is] mentioned in all first-hand
accounts of Mies,”

3
 a n d  t h e  w o r k  p r o d u c e d  d u r i n g

their collaboration is marked by the speed of its
execution.

4
 After the collaboration, Mies’ work did



INTERSTICES 4 Standing in the Shadows 2

not in general maintain the sensibility of the
collaborative period:

There was a change in his later work - a new coldness, a
relentless austerity that many found offensive ... Arthur
Drexler spoke of Mies’s ‘freezing down’ in America ...
Philip Johnson agreed, ‘An architecture of sensibility
seemed more than he could bear.’

5

David Spaeth writes that “Reich’s influence was less
in the realm of ideas than in the application of those
ideas which, prior to 1927, Mies was only beginning
to address - colour, texture, and furniture.”

6
 To

describe Lilly’s influence as being ‘limited’ to
furniture and other such details (thereby implying a
lesser significance) runs counter to classic Miesian
lore which maintains that ‘God is in the details.’
Even if her influence is considered confined and
limited only to the ‘application’ of Mies’ ideas
(denying her any design input) then her role must
still have been absolutely critical and vital in
producing the buildings described as Mies’
masterpieces. For the success of the European work
is precisely its realisation of ideas by attention to
detail, colour, interiors and furniture.

7
 Lilly’s skills

place her at the very core of ‘Miesian’ architecture.

III

Before her collaboration with Mies, Lilly Reich was a
designer of note and had sufficient repute to be
appointed a director in 1920 of the Deutscher
Werkbund. But her work has since been
marginalised. The reasons for this are complex.
Primarily, the idea of collaboration interferes with
the concept of genius. Battersby argues that for
architecture to effect the transition from craft to an
Art in the European tradition, there must be
geniuses.

8
 So in the nineteenth century architectural

history was represented as a succession of great
geniuses and great buildings.

Collaboration was also denied by Mies. He
maintained that: “When an idea is good and it is a
clear idea - then it should only come from one
man.”

9
 In response to Gropius advocating

collaboration in the creation of a building, Mies once
said, “But Gropius, if you decide to have a baby, do
you call in the neighbours?”1

0

The erasure of Lilly Reich from the history of Mies
then, was necessary to promote him to genius and his
work to the realm of Art. But this view of
architectural history requires not just the erasure of
the work of a collaborator, it also requires the
erasure of the work of women.

Genius in the art canon has always been an attribute
of men: men who deviate from the traditional norm,
transcend it and set new rules. Women (and people
of different race) may also deviate from the
proscribed rules and norms, but they do so from a
different position. They are ‘others,’ struggling to be
normal - and failing. Women basically do not “stand
in the same relation to cultural traditions as do
men.”1

1
 “Women perform lower-level conversions of

nature to culture [children, education, cooking] but
when the culture distinguishes a higher level of the
same functions, the higher level is restricted to
men.”1

2
 A woman’s role in the production of art is

tightly circumscribed: Chadwick argues that
historians consistently attribute “to the woman artist
... diligence rather than invention, the locus of
genius.”1

3

Lilly Reich is consistently portrayed dealing with the
details of building with precisely such diligence
rather than the flair attributed to Mies. Her work,
influence and impact is modified to fit into acceptable
cultural definitions of a woman’s role, especially that
of “behind every great man is a woman.”1

4
 Thus, she

is defined as an interior designer or fashion
couturière, (although her talents ranged widely
enough to challenge any such classifications) and
descriptions of her are of the “vine around the figure
of a great man” variety.1

5
 Reich is seen as having a

purely administrative and supportive role, of carrying
the weight of everyday life so that Mies might
concentrate on another world.1

6

IV

This level of bias within the history books meant that
e v e n  o n c e  I  h a d  f o u n d  t h e  n a m e s  o f  women and
uncovered their work it made no difference: no
name carried the status of any of the men, regardless
of talent. And then I discovered a strong history of
women’s involvement in building architecture.
Reaching far back into pre-history, women were the
original builders and for millennia in nomadic and
so-called primitive cultures, women have designed,
built, controlled, and owned the structures that
sheltered them and their families. Adam’s First House
in Eden? Eve would have built it.

But this still wasn’t enough, there always seemed to
b e  a  w a y  t h e  i n f o r m a t i o n  I  w a s  finding could be
sidelined: it was building not architecture ... it was
interesting but not today’s reality ... it was
essentialism ... Something very complex was at work
to keep me illegitimate and in the shadows.



INTERSTICES 4 Standing in the Shadows 3

In frustration I decided that nothing I could do or
say could make any difference because I was missing
the point. It meant nothing that there had been
others and that I could prove that women had been
involved in architecture since time began. It seemed I
could never be legitimate as I was missing the most
essential accessory required to be an architect: the
phallus. But before I resigned forever from the field,
I decided that there might be a clue in this overly
simplistic and pessimistic analysis: that the body has
some kind of hold on architecture.

The body has a long history in Western architecture.
From Vitruvius via the Renaissance theorists such as
Alberti, di Giorgio, and Filarete, and sealed into the
very foundation of Western architectural thought is
the idea that the symmetry and proportion evident in
the human body are natural laws of beauty.
Therefore, the form of the human body should
generate architectural form, its proportions define
architectural proportions, and its parts supply the
measures necessary for building.1

7
 The body centres

the world and architectural rules and configurations.

But the body concerned is not ungendered. It is
unquestionably male. Vitruvius writes of “a well-
shaped man” and his words generated the classic
drawing of a man centred in the circle and square
(fig 2). But at the precise centre of this drawing/view
that posits the male body controlling architecture,
and forming a pure circle to the hands and feet is the
navel. The navel marks the body’s dependence on,
and connection to, the body of woman. So, laying
aside for the moment fears of biological determinism
and essentialism, I began to further search for the
body of woman in architecture

V

In the Barcelona Pavilion is to be found the statue of a
woman (fig 3) . She is veiled by a multitude of
reflections; she both belongs, but is secondary; she is
decorative, additional but somehow also essential;
she controls the building yet seems trapped by its
walls. She is an accessory to the building but views of
the statue, immortalized in the original black and
w h i t e  p h o t o s  a n d  n o w  i n  c o l o u r  g l o s s ,  a r e  iconic
views for Modern Architecture and descriptions of
the pavilion lead to her. An accessory she may be but
also pivotal: the architectural focus of the
building.1

8

Investigation reveals some odd information about this
sculpture by Georg Kolbe. It holds the curious
distinction of being the only part of the composition
to have survived the dismantling of the original 1929

pavilion. Although there was for over half a century
a persistent rumour that the pavilion was held in
storage in a warehouse somewhere in Spain (or
Germany, or Iowa) potentially awaiting
reconstruction, the truth is that all materials were
sold to defray the high cost of the building.1

9
 N o t

even the furniture survived. Reproductions were
made from original drawings.2

0

T h e  s t a t u e  i s  k n o w n  b y  a  number of names: The
Dancer, Morning and Evening a r e  a l l  u s e d  b u t  n o n e
with sufficient authority to be definitive. Hays2

1
 a n d

Frampton2
2
 a n d  t h e  Oxford Companion to Twentieth

Century Art 2
3
 use The Dancer. Tegethoff2

4
 and

Constant2
5
 write of Morning. In a similar vein

Quetglas 2
6
 writes in Spanish of Amanecer translated as

Sunrise in Quetglas, 2
7
 Schulze,2

8
 Drexler2

9
 and

James3
0
 all use Evening.3

1
 Others sidestep the issue by

writing of a ‘statue of a dancer.’

In Euripides, Aphrodite says “I am mighty among men
and they honour me by many names.” 3

2
 This and

other phenomena surrounding the statue seemed to
me to refine it as a kind of ancient goddess figure.
The goddess is commonly perceived in a triple form
as virgin, mother and crone. She is the archetypal
trinity representing a cyclical view of life ruled by
the continuing roll and flow of the seasons; of birth,
death and rebirth.3

3
 She is often and most

powerfully symbolised by the moon and her triple
face portrayed by the phases of the moon. The three
distinct names attributed to the statue are suggestive
of a trinity and the names themselves are evocative of
the phases. Morning: the waxing light of the new
moon; Evening:  t h e  w a n i n g  l i g h t  o f  t h e  o l d  m o o n ;
and the pitch and pivot of the full moon reminds me
of T. S. Eliot’s lines: “At the still point of the turning
world ... there the dance is.”3

4

The raised arms gesture is an ancient one; f i g  4  is of
a painted terracotta female figurine, the bird-faced
goddess of pre-dynastic Egypt, with her arms raised
to invoke the power of life:

One of the clan-ensigns of the Chalcolithic Age had been
the uplifted arms so commonly depicted as a human gesture
on funerary vases or clay figurines or the rock paintings of
the desert, a gesture perhaps expressive of the invocation or
reception of divine force. In the days of written texts this
was the symbol of Ka, the single life-energy
[potentiality].3

5

Applied colour in the pavilion is most notably used



INTERSTICES 4 Standing in the Shadows 4

in the other, like the statue, non-constructional but
still architectonic elements of the pavilion: the white
furniture, red curtains and black carpet. These are
also the colours of triple goddess and correspond
with phases of the moon: “the New Moon is the
white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon,
the red goddess of love and battle; the Old Moon,
the black goddess of death and divination.”3

6

This overlap between the qualities and attributes of
the statue and those of the goddess seems to me to
mark a series of coincidences that implicate the statue
as representing a goddess figure.

VI

So, if the statue can be seen as an ancient goddess
figure, might this make the Barcelona Pavilion a pagan
temple?

That the pavilion might be seen as such is certainly a
provocative, perhaps even a perverse, idea; and these
observations might seem somewhat circumstantial, an
interesting story but ... if it wasn’t for the fact that
t h e  w o r k  o f  M i e s ,  a n d  t h e  p a v i l i o n  in particular,
have consistently provoked comparisons to religious
buildings.

Drexler states that “Mies has designed nothing but
temples.” 3

7
 Tegethoff writes of the statue in the pool

b e i n g  l i k e  t h e  c u l t  f i g u r e  i n  t h e  c e l l a  o f  a  Greek
temple. 3

8
 Glaeser suggests formal analogies with a

Basilica. 3
9
 According to Scully, the basilica form is

derived from the architecture of Greek temples to
the Goddess Demeter. “Demeter’s sites ... formed a
link which ran beneath the normal surface of Greek
design and connected the older architecture of the
religion of the goddess with the new architecture of
Christianity [the Basilica].4

0
 Even earlier sacred spaces

and temples link very strongly to the body of
woman. Predating the Demeter sites are the
sanctuaries at Malta where the plans have a clear
correlation to the shape of carved goddess figures of
the same era (fig 5).

What the body of woman probably represented at
the time was “the conception of a pervading
principle, not in this case their own creative power,
but a life substance through which that power could
act, conceived already in the form of maternal
fecundity.”4

1
 What is being spoken of here is potency

and power which seemed to belong to woman. As
the source of the power, she was therefore deified as
goddess and sacred places honoured her sacred
body. Labyrinths were ancient sacred spaces that

required ritual in order to be entered. They
symbolised “the female womb, only penetrable if one
is pure and perfect.”4

2
 Every time a sacred space was

entered, it was the reenactment of entering the body
of woman. Guidoni describes a ritual of the
Australian aborigines which involves the use of a
sacred pole, symbolic of “contact between the earth,
the subterranean world and the sky as well as of the
male sex ... [The pole] represents the link with the
most sacred.”4

3
 I f  t h e  p h a l l u s  i s  t h e  l i n k  w i t h  t h e

most sacred, then that which is most sacred is the
interior of the body of woman.

VII

So, if architecturally pivotal to the pavilion, captured
in bronze and framed by familiar archaic forms, is a
powerful symbol of a goddess; if the pavilion is
consistently, one way or another, considered a
religious or sacred building and sacred spaces have a
history that connects them to the body of woman;
and we know that the design of this building was
t o u c h e d  b y  t h e  h a n d  o f  a  w o m a n ,  i s  t h e  Barcelona
Pavilion then a pagan temple to the goddess?

But perhaps this is not the question because there is
another body of a woman that I feel a need to place
in the pavilion: my own (fig 6). As a woman walking
through the building, it disturbed and unsettled me.
I felt alienated by it. The purity of its detail and
space, its simplicity and the slick lines attract; but a
woman alone in a foreign country is ever wary and
weary of slick lines, the pick-up lines.

The pavilion’s simplicity makes it seem almost bland.
But what is disturbing for me is not this blandness,
this seeming self-effacement; but the near total
effacement of woman. Her position in the pavilion
may be pivotal, but it is highly ambiguous: Lilly Reich
is buried by history, the statue is bounded and frozen
by walls, and if the body of woman ever underwrote
the building it has long since been overshadowed.

This bondage reveals a powerful need to
circumscribe and contain the body of woman. The
presence of rules to control women in many
cultures, past and present, marks a consistency so
prevalent that Rapoport argues that the position of
women within a culture has a decisive impact on the
format and meaning of the whole built environment
of that culture.4

4

In Ancient Greece, the desire to control woman is
clearly articulated. Women were never a part of
that public world that has bequeathed us the great
Greek temples and precincts. These places were for



INTERSTICES 4 Standing in the Shadows 5

the citizens of the city who were men free-born, not
slaves nor women. Their world was the house which
(in stark contrast to the public architecture) had a
straight-forward, utilitarian purpose namely the
“shelter of moveable property.”4

5
 According to

Euripides “a sympathetic wife is the greatest ktema
(possession).”4

6
 Women were possessions necessarily

secluded to maintain legitimate child birth to ensure
“the transfer of wealth with the right to citizenship
from one generation of men to the next.” 4

7

Enclosure amounting to captivity, was an economic
and legal requirement within the culture.

A further reason women had to be kept under
control may have been because her body was once
considered sacred. The Greek term muchos  is the
word for the women’s quarters, but it can also refer
to Hades (the underworld) and a prophet’s shrine.4

8

Sanctity carries a notion of polluting: one can only
enter a sacred space if properly prepared. The
handling of sacred objects or the conducting of
rituals is always subject to very detailed and precise
instructions, for the sacred has the power to destroy.
S o  t o o  d o  w o m e n .  R u t h  P a d e l  a r g u e s  t h a t  Greek
systems of thought held the view that woman can
threaten male order and men’s life and sanity
because they are open to both passion and daemonic
infiltration.4

9
 Women endanger men by being

enterable. Mark Wigley argues that woman was seen
as not being able to control herself, and so she
required walls to both contain and define her.5

0
 She

was polluting and needed to be edged and contained
least she leak and contaminate the world.

The site of that deemed necessary control, seclusion
and enclosure is the house. A certain fear of
woman’s openness to invasion which stems from both
cultural and biological notions has continued
through the centuries. Consequently, underlying
architecture has been the idea that the house
functions to enclose and control woman. A man’s
home is his castle, but kept within is woman: it is
quite simply the container of woman. Within, she
appears to be controlling it, embodying it even in
poetic images, but is at the same time utterly trapped
by it. Superficially only, does she command the walls
that imprison her.

Luce Irigaray pinpoints this relationship as the
foundation of male identity:

woman has been represented as the space or place by and in
which man can find a position and locate himself. As the
corporeal horizon of his existence, the mother cannot be
seen as occupying a place of her own. She is space, place or

‘home’ and consequently has none herself ... Women,
especially mothers, are considered the dwelling, home or
haven from which man comes, his nostalgic place of origin.
But this is a place the man must leave in order to create
his own.5

1

Rousseau believed that “when the mistress of the
house goes wandering in public, her home is a lifeless
body which is soon corrupted.”5

2
 Henrietta Barnet

who founded the Hampstead Garden Suburb, regarded
the woman’s body as “the shell of the home.”5

3
 I n

this suburban house is literally embodied ‘the
feminine mystique’ which Betty Friedan identified in
the early sixties: a woman’s place is in the home.
And that home is “the stage set for the effective
s e x u a l  d i v i s i o n  o f  l a b o u r  . . .  a  s p u r  f o r  m a l e  p a i d
labour and a container for female unpaid labour.”5

4

Architecture seems to exist to control the body of
woman.

Yet even contained, woman still threatens. Although
the apron-strings actually securely tie the woman to
the house, there is a fear that they might too ensnare
the man. Freud speaks of this fear in his investigation
of the uncanny (unheimlich):

Freud makes much of the fact that ... one might see
‘heimlich’ [homely] as a word the meaning of which
develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally
coincides with its opposite, ‘unheimlich.’5

5

VIII

I too have a fear, perhaps the fear of the trapped. I
have felt muted, circumscribed and barely visible in
this world of architecture. I have sat at drawing
boards in frustration trying to ease the rigid lines
drawn before me. I have wondered that maybe I was
simply gilding the cage and blinding the bars of some
kind of trap for myself and those for whom I was
designing. I have sat in libraries reading, and felt the
words cut and enter my body in unconsenting
surgery. Words built on slithers of fact and slathers
of assumptions slicing my body to twist and confuse
and render it invisible, obscured, but above all
s i l e n t .  A n d  I  h a v e  f e a r e d  t h a t  t h e r e  w a s  n o  o t h e r
way of being, that I had no choice.

The condition of woman in architecture has been so
bound and constricted and acts so against us, it
implies the impossibility of women being architects ...
almost. But before this argument assigns us a place
settled deep within the status quo, we need to
examine the controlling images and metaphors of the
position. For within architecture, woman is tightly



INTERSTICES 4 Standing in the Shadows 6

controlled and circumscribed, both in actuality and
as an image. The male or masculine is seen to overlap
the human, to represent the universal. But the body
of woman has been bound tight within the role of
maternity. So tight, that in architecture it is literally
t h a t  o f  a  mummy .  N o t  o n l y  i s  s h e  d e f i n e d  by her
maternal function and her womb, she is also defined
by the weaving of the bandages that bind her. In
architecture, the womb is assigned to closure: either
as a closure that failed or is unreliable because it
rejects; or as the ultimate enclosure of a both safe
haven or claustrophobic prison.

As it stands now, architecture can be seen as being
constructed with piercing and painful foundations on
the body of woman. In some traditions, the
foundations of any new structure were slaked with a
blood sacrifice. Yet although the body of woman lies
at the foundations of architecture, it is actually a
bloodless sacrifice (no less painful or destructive for
women for being bloodless). Because it is precisely
her blood that is excluded. For blood is life and life
is necessarily that which has been excluded from
architecture. Adolph Loos maintained that “the art in
architecture is preponderant only in the tomb and
the monument.”5

6
 Neither are for the living.

As a tactic, it is possible to let blood flow and to re-
read the body of woman in architecture. This is not
to argue a form of biological determinism, nor to
invoke the nostalgia of a lost feminine paradise, but
to consider its potential as an image and metaphor in
other ways. To speak of the body of woman as more
than the womb, or at the very least to speak more
accurately of the womb. To approach the body of
woman without fear, awe, reverence or other
notions that create separation, isolation and
alienation. To uncover other modes of the feminine
than the maternal.

According to Irigaray “the relation to the body is
always a symbolic one.” 5

7
 It is possible to re-

interpret and consequently alter symbols, which is
w h y  I  s p e a k  o f  t h e  b o d y  o f  w o m a n ,  o f  h e r  w o m b
and of her blood, for through these metaphors and
symbol we can access architecture in complexities
that are otherwise denied. More complex
relationships between sacred and profane, the living
and the dead, enclosure and openness, and closing in
and opening out are possible, I believe, than are ever
dreamt of in the architecture that surrounds us at
present.

What happens when the blood of woman is allowed
to flow? Any liquid is deadly to foundations: it seeps
i n  c a u s i n g  s l i p  p l a n e s  . . .  I f  w e  a l l o w  fluidity, we

unfreeze the moment and may gain insights into
conceptions of identity, legitimacy and survival. The
accessory that aids and abets can also undermine and
redefine. To see something as an accessory, it is
necessary to place it and fix it in one point: it is to
see bags and label them as useful or decorative. We
are nothing without our accessories, they are a
powerful tool. But equally, we can choose them.

If we allow the womb life, then it simply cannot be
said that the womb is the dark secretive prison of
nightmares. The foetus is rarely a secret from the
world, and the womb is diaphanous with light
filtered through skin and membranes and the sounds
of the body and heartbeat; more like the tent of the
vernacular tradition than the solid cave, that static
enclosure with which it is usually identified. It
nourishes and nurtures and then, although it might
be difficult to leave, it opens out to the world. But
more than anything the womb is about a nearness
and touch that survives the physical separation of
birth (the psychic separation occurs much later in the
infant’s life). Connection is possible without physical
proximity or physical solidity which argues to a
differing conception and/or re-interpretation of built
form.

If we acknowledge an idea of nearness, then the
narrow separations made by architecture and
architectural history become unsustainable:
separations that place the work of women like Lilly
Reich and countless others in the shadows. An
architecture premised on notions of the body of
woman could not dissociate the living from the
spiritual; nor articulate such separations; nor confine
and define those that inhabit. It must open out to the
world, yet retain an accommodation of intimacy. The
flesh made form requires a fluidity (like of blood) if
i t  i s  n o t  t o  c o n g e a l  into something that limits. It
requires too a dynamic and ever-opening relationship
with the world. An architecture of relationship, of
interaction and dialogue between multiple strands,
provides a key to potential futures accommodating
the world in infinity and intimacy, rather than
alienation and limits.

IX

In a pastiche of canonical interpretations of the
Barcelona Pavilion, Bonta summarizes:

The pavilion suggested a new kind of spatial experience
based on having no spaces closed but each space fluidly
linked to adjacent indoor or outdoor areas. Roof, floor and
walls, rather than forming a continuous enclosure, became
separate ... Their independence was further accentuated by



INTERSTICES 4 Standing in the Shadows 7

their different materials, whilst spatial continuity was
emphasized ... It explored the expressive possibilities of the
free plan ... The new spatial experience and the free plan
make each other possible.5

8

The use of words such as fluid, spatial continuity and
free plan suggest the idea of an architecture of
openness, of free-flowing dynamic space. It sounds
like the kind of architecture that a new reading of
the body of woman in architecture might engender.

The building is inscrutable to the point of
frustration. Surfaces are mirror-like but offer little
other than intriguing but ultimately banal reflections.
At one level, the pavilion demands silence: of the
visitor, of women, of the voicing of doubts. And yet
it has generated volumes of noise in the form of
written and spoken commentaries and explanations;
including my own. In demanding silence, it offers
reflection and allows ‘opening-in’ to occur. Such
chances for reflection need be chosen, but they also
need to be articulated against the silence, however
imprecise the utterances may be. Which is why I
speak of metaphors and myths, with words that
somersault meanings. We need stories to help us
exist in the world, and they also create and recreate
it. Stories that place woman at the centre of
architecture, re-write and re-interpret history and
reveal violence, assist our understanding of how and
who we are. They are, however, approximations not
truths; but nor are the stories that have come down
to us as if engraved on stone. When seen as the truth
they can easily blind.

The Barcelona Pavilion w a s  t h e  p r o d u c t  o f  l i e s  a n d
oppressions but it is also formed from a dynamic
tension with concepts of truth. If we consider that its
flaws tell the truth and its perfection lies, then
actually what is open and open-ended about the
pavilion is its ability to receive interpretations.
Somehow it is able to accommodate the
contradictions and the oppositions of all that anyone
has ever said, and will say, about it. Maybe ‘God’ is
not in the details but in the surfaces that sheen and
reflect allowing multiple stories and possibilities.

The Barcelona Pavilion is not an answer nor the
future. It should not be replicated, nor should we
be forced into Mies and Lilly’s brave new world.
W e  d o  n o t  n e e d  a n o t h e r  h e r o  -  n o t  t h e  o l d  M i e s
nor a newly resurrected Lilly - but we do need the
lessons critiquing their building offer us. The pavilion
has been regarded as an exhibition building exhibiting
nothing but itself, with no utilitarian purpose. In
effect it is a folly and follies reveal our dreams and
nightmares. Its value lies in the multiple stories that

can be woven into it. Without critique, it is barren
and useless. For me, it stands as an embodiment of
the idea that knowledge is meaningless if
uninterpreted and unquestioned, and that
understanding is a process of endless interpretation.

The pavilion is a hall of mirrors and flashing in the
polished surfaces, shining in the reflections and
disappearing into the glass can be seen ever-changing
glimpses of other worlds, other architectures, other
truths. When one route only to the truth (and
architecture) is dominant the work, dreams and
knowledges of women (and other marginalised
peoples) are repressed. Other stories and routes
provide us with a place to stand, necessarily
temporary, from which we might re-imagine the
world and thereby begin to re-construct it.

NOTES

1 Sandra Honey, “Mies in Germany,” Architectural
Monographs (1986), n. 11, p. 19.

2 Wolf Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity: Mies
van der Rohe’s Breakthrough to Modernism,” Mies
van der Rohe: Critical Essays ed. Franz Schulze, (New
York: Museum of Modern Art; Cambridge: M.I.T.
Press, 1989), p. 57.

3 Karin Kirsch, The Weissenhofsiedlung (New York:
Rizzoli, 1989), p. 33.

4 “Having received the commision [for the Barcelona
Pavilion] some time around the first of July 1928,
Mies responded with atypical speed and decisiveness.
Even under the most concentrated of normal
conditions h e  w a s  w o n t  t o  f u s s  e n d l e s s l y  o v e r  a
project, forever revising, leaving a trail of hundreds
of sketches.” Franz Schulze M i e s  van der Rohe: A
Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985), p. 152.

5 Elaine Hochman, A r c h i t e c t s  o f  F o r t u n e :  M i e s  van der
Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1989), p. 291.

6 David Spaeth, “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: A
Biographical Essay,”  Mies Reconsidered: His Career,
Legacy and Disciples  ed. John Zukowsky, (New York:
Rizzoli; Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago,
1986), p. 34.

7 “The materials themselves [in the Silk and Velvet
Café] were no less important to the effect of the
ensemble ... reflected Reich’s exceptional way with
textiles as well as her vivid, opulent sense of
colour.” Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A  Critical
Biography p. 144.



INTERSTICES 4 Standing in the Shadows 8

8 Christine Battersby, “The Architect as Genius:
Feminism and the Aesthetics of Exclusion,” albA
(1991), v. 1, n. 3, pp. 9-17.

9 Mies van der Rohe, “No Dogma,” Interbuild (1959),
v. 6, n. 6, p. 10.

10 Mies cited, Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A  Critical
Biography p. 338.

11 Battersby, “The Architect as Genius,” p. 16.

12 Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to
Culture,” Woman Culture and Society eds. Rosaldo and
Lamphere, (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1974), p. 80.

13 Whitney Chadwick, Women Art and Society (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1990), p. 26.

14 “Soon after her arrival in Berlin she took over the
organization and management of Mies’ architectural
practice, attending to all the things he hated to do
and leaving him free to get on with the design work
(in w h i c h  s h e  t o o  was active).” Honey, “Mies in
Germany,” p. 19.

15 Kirsch, The Weissenhofsiedlung  p. 62.

16 “Some of the explanation for this alacrity rest with
Lilly Reich, whose responsibility for the exhibition
halls relieved Mies of much of the burdens ... Thus
he could devote his energies mostly to the pavilion.”
Schulze, Mies van d e r  R o h e :  A  Critical Biography p.
153.

17 Vitruvius,  The Ten Books on Architecture trans. Morris
Morgan, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1914), p. 73.

18 “in the smaller pool stood the figure of a woman by
Kolbe, balancing on a rock and gesturing with her
outstretched arms. Toward this image the observer
was led, seeing it first through the glass ‘darkly’ and
then coming out to it where its act was exposed to
the s k y  a n d  framed by the constructivist planes.
Now, however, its sudden precarious gesture
seemed to be creating the constructivist environment
around itself and, once seen, controlled the building
completely. All the p l a n e s  s e e m e d  t o  b e  derived
from it, positioned by it, even as its lifted arm could
be faintly perceived from the far end of the
platform.” Vincent Scully, Modern Architecture: The
Architecture of Democracy (New York: George
Braziller, 1974), p. 28.

19 Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van d e r  R o h e :  t h e  Villas and
Country Houses  (New York: Museum of Modern Art;

Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1985), p. 74.

20 Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography  p .
159.

21 K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture,” Perspecta
(1984), n. 21, pp. 14-29.

22 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture - A Critical
History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985).

23 Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Art e d .  H a r o l d
Osborne, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

24 Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe: the Villas and Country
Houses.

25 Caroline Constant, “The Barcelona Pavilion as
Landscape Garden: Modernity and the Picturesque,”
AA Files  (1990), v. 20, pp. 46-54.

26 Josep Quetglas, “Relato en Tres Actos,” On  (1986),
n. 73, pp. 12-22.

27 José Quetglas, “Fear of Glass: the Barcelona
Pavilion,” Architectureproduction Revisions ed. Beatriz
Colomina, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
1988), pp. 122-151.

28 Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: Interior Spaces
(Chicago: The Arts Club of Chicago, 1982).

29 Arthur Drexler, The Mies van der Rohe Archive (New
York and London: Garland Publishing Ltd, 1986), v.
2.

30 Warren A. James, “Barcelona,” Progressive Architecture
(1986), n. 8, pp. 61-67.

31 James’ article actually titles the statue The Dancer in a
photo caption but uses Evening in the text. The
caption is corrected in an erratum in a following
issue of the magazine.

32 Euripides cited, Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple
and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture ( N e w  H a v e n :
Yale University Press, 1979), p. 80.

33 “In this trinity ‘three’ were ‘even’ (the same), in that
one goddess appeared in three manifestations
corresponding to the three tiers that composed the
world. First she was a bright young maiden-huntress
o f  t h e  air ... Then she was the mature woman
goddess at the centre, dispensing fertility, ruling land
and sea, an erotic divinity ... And finally she was an
old woman who lives in the underworld, the
goddess of death who at the same time effects
rebirth.” Christa Wolf, “A Letter,”  Feminist Aesthetics



INTERSTICES 4 Standing in the Shadows 9

ed. Gisela Ecker, (London: The Women’s Press,
1985), p. 98.

34 T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (London:
Faber & Faber, 1959), ln. 62-63.

35 G. Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn (London: Faber &
Faber, 1948), p. 116.

36 Robert Graves, The White Goddess (London: Faber &
Faber, 1961), p. 70.

37 Arthur Drexler, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (New York:
George Braziller, 1960), p. 32.

38. Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe: the Villas and Country
Houses p. 80.

39 “The way Mies accommodated the public and
ceremonial functions suggests analogies with a
Romanesque church plan: the open part of the
pavilion representing the atrium, the roofed part the
Basilica replete with nave and aisles, and the end
walls the apse formed by the walls around the small
pool. It even had a monumental altar piece in the
gold onyx wall, which, although shifted
perpendicularly out of axis, clearly marked the
Pavilion’s ritual centre.” Glaeser cited, Tegethoff,
Mies van der Rohe: the Villas and Country Houses p. 81.

40 Scully, The Earth, the Temples and the Gods p. 79.

41 Levy, The Gate of Horn p. 62.

42 Adrian Fisher and Georg Gerster, The Art of the Maze
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990), p. 19.

43 Enrico Guidoni, Primitive Architecture trans. Robert
Wolf, (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1978), p. 49.

44 Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1969), p. 65.

45. Susan Walker, “Women and Housing in Classical
Greece: the Archaelogical Evidence,” Images of Women
in Antiquity  eds. Averil Cameron and Amelie Kuhrt,
(London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 82.

46 Euripides cited, Ruth Padel, “Women: Model for
Possession by Greek Daemons,” Images of Women in
Antiquity eds. Averil Cameron and Amelie Kuhrt,
(London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 4.

47 Walker, “Women and Housing in Classical Greece,”
p. 82.

48 Padel, “Women,” p. 10.

49 Padel, “Women.”

50 Mark Wigley, “Untitled: the Housing of Gender,”
Sexuality and Space ed. Beatriz Colomina, (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), pp. 327-389.

51 Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions (St Leonards, New
South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1989), p. 173.

52 Rousseau cited, Chadwick, Women Art and Society p .
137.

53 Barnet cited, Lynne Walker, “Concrete Proof:
Women, Architecture and Modernism,” FAN  (1990),
v. 3, n. 4, p. 7.

54 Dolores Hayden, “What Would a Non-Sexist City
Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design
and Human Work,” Women and the American City eds.
Stimpson, Dixler, Nelson and Yatrakis, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 169.

55 Anthony Vidler, “The Building in Pain,” A A  F i l e s  n .
19, p. 10.

56 Loos cited, Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in
Paradise  (Cambridge and London: M.I.T. Press,
1981), p. 27.

57 Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the
Feminine (London and New York: Routledge, 1991),
p. 70.

58 Juan Pablo Bonta, An Anatomy of Architectural
Interpretation (Barcelona: G Gili, 1975), p. 62.