The critical nature of the reconstruction of modern icons

Abstract

The ways in which two masterpieces of modern architecture, the Villa Savoye at Poissy and the German Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Barcelona, both designed in the very late 1920’s, were restored, in a broad sense and respectively through rehabilitation and reconstruction, after the turn of 1966 are problematic. From the 1930s onwards, the plans and images of these two works played an essential role in disseminating the canon of modern architecture. Later, Burri's photographs or Tschumi’s advertisements served as documents that demonstrate the high degree of ruin that the villa finished by Le Corbusier in 1931 had reached, given the refusal of its owners to renovate the building after the damage suffered during the Second World War. Even in its significant material degradation, the villa continued to reflect its essential formal components, but in its deterioration illustrated metaphorically the crisis that the orthodoxy of the modern movement was undergoing. In contrast, the pavilion designed by Mies Van der Rohe, which was conceived as a temporary construction, endured as a vanished reference that was never altered in its pure image and whose material reproduction had been demanded since the 1950s by Barcelona's leading architects. When these two repristination operations were completed in the 1980s, the strategies that were employed, in both cases generally in line with the restauro scientifico, were widely accepted by critics. However, some others underlined several contradictions in this respect. For example, one of them, concerning the German Pavilion, is of an ontological nature, questioning the pertinence of reconstructing a transitory building by raising its material qualities, using later construction techniques and completing, after interpretative work, its external definition. This paper analyses the approaches to restauro critico applied in these two interventions, highlighting the nonstraightforward architecture nature of the results achieved through them.