We walk through a city just like we walk through nature but we are surrounded by an environment that has been molded to accommodate us. We navigate through streets like in a canyon of artificial stone and look up, feeling dwarfed by the walls being built around us. It’s surprising how little we notice. We live our lives surrounded by a manufactured world, take little interest in how it looks, how it feels.

Like many of his contemporaries, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe was looking for a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as the Renaissance or Gothic style did for their own eras. He created an influential twentieth-century architectural style with realistic clarity and simplicity.

The Barcelona Pavilion was designed in 1928 by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1929 in Barcelona Spain. The building instantly became a masterpiece in van der Rohe’s career, a symbol for the twentieth century Modernism movement and an inspiration for generations of future architects, all over the globe.