Re-enactment: Lilly Reich’s Work Occupies the Barcelona Pavilion, by Laura Martínez de Guereñu

Re-enactment is a material response to the invisibility of Lilly Reich’s work. It arises with a clear motivation: to reveal the architecture designed by Lilly Reich for the German sections of the 1929 International Exposition inside eight noucentista Palaces, an area that is fifty times bigger than the Pavilion itself.

Re-enactment occupies the heart of the Pavilion with the reconstruction of two of the display-cases Lilly Reich originally designed for the Palaces. The intervention transforms a vertical element of light – the milky color double-glazed screen–  into a horizontal display-case with an exhibiting purpose and adds a vertical display-case to the visitor’s path to the inner pond. This reconstruction was possible thanks to the blueprints that Lilly Reich saved moving them to Muhlhausen (Thuringia) during World War II, the originals of which are nowadays a part of the Lilly Reich Collection of the Mies van der Rohe Archive in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

By presenting documents from another dozen of archives and private collections from Barcelona, Berlin, Dessau, Frankfurt, Madrid, Sevilla and Weimar, the horizontal display-case provides an unprecedented tour through the Palaces. The intervention recovers the “great photos of Barcelona” that Lilly Reich herself regretted losing in a bombing in Berlin, and that shows how her display-cases accomplished the scalar transition from the great variety of German products to the very diverse spatial structures of the Palaces. By means of two short films, the vertical display-case highlights the immaterial heritage of the work made in Barcelona and reveals the Pavilion as an “anteroom” to more than 16.000 m2 of industrial exhibitions.