Concealed behind Transparencies. A Closer Look at Architecture’s Hidden Performativity through the Barcelona Pavilion

Following Andres Jaque’s influential reading of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society, 2012–2013), this chapter makes a case for a performative vision of architecture. Just like gender for Judith Butler, architectures are performative inasmuch as they keep reproducing themselves over time: their appearance as unchanging entities is the result of an ongoing process that, quite paradoxically, hides its mechanisms by repeating itself. A wide range of maintenance activities is crucial to counter the Pavilion’s aging, yet such actions are kept hidden. Architecture, thus, presents itself as the “art of space” by removing time from sight. This image of timeless architecture is continuously reperformed in the field of knowledge production in how hegemonic architectural narratives, deeply imbued with Western metaphysics, keep looking at buildings as ageless artworks, excluding the spatial and temporal framework in which they are inscribed. The everchanging ways in which they are acted out by their users, the role that other actors, besides the architect, play in their production and reproduction over time. This chapter sheds light upon the aesthetic and political potential of such acts of unfolding.