Phantom Book (Pavilion curtain cover) – Andrés Jaque

Description

An important part of the objects that are kept in the building’s basement were scattered around the Pavilion’s space. The basement, which is presented as the Pavilion’s PHANTOM and which never before attracted the visitor’s attention, is nevertheless made prominent by Jaque, who gives it an essential role in the emergence of architecture as a social construction.

As Mies pointed out, architecture is built in a way that the visible make up that which remains hidden. The Barcelona Pavilion is a confrontation arena organized in a two-story architecture, where two interdependent concepts clash: the upper story, luminous, which revives founding notions of that sort (in which the extraordinary, the origins and the essences lead the common), and a dark basement, which gives it contingencies and provisional agreements. The upper story is physically translucent, but it hides the social covenants in which it happens and provides access to an immeasurable daily experience. The lower story is obscure and, paradoxically, is where the agreements, the experiments and the disputes that make up the Pavilion gain transparency.