Miesunderstandings Exhibition

Miesunderstandings Exhibition

In the work by Mies Van der Rohe the curtain wall can be understood as a technical facade system of cladded glass on a metallic sub-structure used in projects as Lakeshore Drive (Chicago - 1949) or Seagram Building (New York - 1954-1958), and as a velvet and silk textile installed as a linear and soft curved surface at the Barcelona pavilion (1929) and at Cafe Same & Seide in Berlin (1929).

For our installation we merged both curtain wall devices and export them into the tropic as one.

We made two system effects become one by merging and putting together inside and outside, blurring and inverting the limits, creating an awkward sense of ambiguity and strangeness sense of scale.

For that we created a printed velvet textile with selected images of tropical nature as moss, plants, flowers, tree barks and lichens as a new site construct for the hallway, in order to making it become a place. We based our compositions on the walls of Mies´s Barcelona pavillion and Tugendhat house and inverted them in its material and functional logic, what once was marble or onyx here they all become tropical vegetation. What once was rigid and made to allow transparency, climatic control and precision, in our piece it becomes mobile, dynamic, and porous.

We believe letting air through is a condition to define architecture limits and therefore we contrast tropical architectures as austere as they are with some of Mies´s projects architectures under construction (Farnsworth house and Lakeshore Drive ) to let them be tropicalized as a response to a bizarre and alien condition questioning the idea of context, origin and destination of architecture elements and cannons emphasizing the most primary and basic elements of architecture.

Our installation creates 5 niches to exhibit photographs that describe the architecture and the landscape of the coffee growing region of Suroeste located 100 km southwest from Medellin. The photographs depicting the landscape and the atmosphere are taken by colombian artist Camilo Echavarría; while images of our project Farallones comunitary coffee wet mill, vernacular architecture and 19th century coffee wet mills are taken by Colombian photographer Camilo Echeverri.

Colombia as many tropical countries is trapped in a narrow definition of its architecture history. Is trapped between colonial (Iberic) architecture, informal architecture, modern architecture heritage, and none Pre-Columbian architecture heritage as in Mexico or Peru. This situation makes it difficult for a practitioner to critically depart engaging history and a practiced derived directly from it.

Therefore we need to define history from another perspective, as a systematic adaptation of interrupted canons, processes and materials due to weather conditions and available techniques, so faraway and distant from the original that with time it evolves creating an order of its own in an imprecise architectonic way, distorting it so much so that it is no longer an original, either related directly in form, and perhaps letting words alone become the only witnesses of an original.