JOURNAL ARTICLES by Laura Lizondo-Sevilla
Open House International, 2024
City planning and construction have embraced circular economy principles, converting them into va... more City planning and construction have embraced circular economy principles, converting them into various indicators. Particularly in the European context, the question “what architecture for circularity?” is answered with policies focusing on techniques, materials and disassembling construction. This paper analyzes a new approach to sustainable design and explores the concept of Km0 architecture. The objective is to demonstrate the design strategies of a contemporary architecture based on local resources and knowledge, an architecture that works with the shortest possible loop in circularity, i.e. with the cycle that consumes the least amount of energy. The paper presents two ways of understanding sustainability in architecture: the first as a result of policies and the second associated with the design and innovative-based New European Bauhaus initiative. Within the scope of this last understanding, the authors analyze three cases on the Spanish Mediterranean coast that have recently received media attention and prominence. The selection responds to a specific climate adaption through a certain typological and functional diversity of the works. The studied cases exhibit a more equitable and cost-effective circularity based on the time factor, have long life-cycle designs and serve as repositories of cultural identity. Km0 architecture reduces emissions using local resources and mitigates environmental conditions by combining traditional and modern design strategies. This paper fulfills an identified need to study the local understandings of the built environment that would ensure a more fair and inclusive European green transformation.
revista EGA expresión gráfica arquitectónica, 2023
The first monograph on Mies van der Rohe was published in 1947 to coincide with the exhibition cu... more The first monograph on Mies van der Rohe was published in 1947 to coincide with the exhibition curated by Philip Johnson at MoMA in New York. Although this exhibition has been considered by critics as the first to present Mies’s work exclusively, new documents reveal that in December 1938 the “Exhibition of Architecture by Miës van der Rohe” opened at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), which included drawings, photographs and models from his European period. This article aims to present this monographic exhibition by graphically analysing the material that has remained unpublished until now: seven photographs in the archives of the University of Michigan and a press release in the AIC Archives Research Center. The three-dimensional survey provided details the architecture on display, and compares it with the American exhibitions that preceded and followed it (1932 and 1947), both organised by MoMA.
VLC arquitectura, 2022
This article investigates the role played by David N. Haid - a graduate student at IIT and assist... more This article investigates the role played by David N. Haid - a graduate student at IIT and assistant in Mies van der Rohe’s office - developed in the National Theater project, which was submitted to the competition announced by the city of Mannheim in 1952 and decided in the spring of 1953. The archival work and the method of comparative analysis reveal two important aspects. Firstly, that Mies van der Rohe’s project for the competition on invitation is contemporary with the final master’s project, entitled An Arts Center, which Haid defended in June 1953, a master thesis supervised by Mies, as stated in his preface. Secondly, the resemblance between Haid’s proposal for a multi purpose arts center and Mies’s Mannheim Theater is very evident, with the two projects being identical in almost every aspect: metrics, proportion, structure, and even the construction of the two models and the staging of their photographs. The temporal and architectural coincidence of the two works reveals the decisive role that David Haid played in this singular project, hitherto only attributed to Mies van der Rohe.
ACE. Architecture, City and Environment , 2021
Mies van der Rohe started teaching architecture in 1930, the year he was appointed ... more Mies van der Rohe started teaching architecture in 1930, the year he was appointed head of the Dessau Bauhaus. Political upheavals in Germany at that time obliged him to move to new premises and even to a new country: in 1938 he emigrated to the USA as head of the architecture department at the Armour Institute of Technology. In the twenty-eight years from his early days at the Bauhaus to his retirement from the school in Chicago, teaching was one of his main activities: classrooms were an ideal laboratory for experimenting with and thinking about architecture, and as a working architect he invariably brought his experience into the classroom. The aim of this paper is to examine the links between Mies’ teaching, thinking and architecture more closely in order to determine the connection between his teaching of architectural design and his work as an architect. However, within such a wide field, this paper focuses on a specific typology: the school of architecture. The hypothesis to be answered is: did Mies’ experience as a professor, and the professional and academic homologous projects in which he was involved, play a decisive role in the design of the only venue he built from scratch for teaching architecture: the open-plan Crown Hall? The research methodology employed consisted of revising, analysing and redrawing the different venues where Mies taught architectural design and comparing them with research projects about this typology. The ideas presented in dissertations directed by Mies about designing schools of architecture were of particular interest for this paper."
REVISTA PROYECTO PROGRESO ARQUITECTURA, 2020
One of the defining features of post-World War II architecture and urban planning was the percept... more One of the defining features of post-World War II architecture and urban planning was the perception of the city as a changing organism. This led to the emergence of new approaches to dynamic and heterogeneous cities based on the multiplicity and segregation of their layouts and relationship spaces. Among others, this complexity was implemented in the higher education institutions built in Great Britain during the nineteen sixties, resulting in the creation of seven universities –the so-called Plateglass Universities–, which advocated modern, scientific and egalitarian education, in parallel with new teaching strategies. In order to gain a better understanding of these architectures, this article contextualises the seven universities as a whole and specifies the most unique case study, the University of East Anglia, designed by Denys Lasdun. Based on an analysis of the original archived documentation and the experience of its spaces, it reflects on the validity of a series of approaches that address the layering and independence of the land line in order to tackle new architectural, social, and educational challenges.
Revista de Arquitectura 22(2), 2020
Tanto la teoría del proyecto arquitectónico (qué se enseña) como su metodología (cómo se enseña) ... more Tanto la teoría del proyecto arquitectónico (qué se enseña) como su metodología (cómo se enseña) cuentan con una notable tradición que se enriquece constantemente con nuevas perspectivas. Sin embargo, cuando hay que diseñar el taller de proyectos, las concreciones pedagógicas se dan con los objetivos específicos de la formación (para qué se enseña) y con la disponibilidad de recursos (con qué se enseña). Este texto reflexiona sobre la temporalidad y espacialidad del taller de proyectos arquitectónicos como factores determinantes a la hora de dar forma a una epistemología del proyecto. La hipótesis se evidencia mediante un caso de estudio: se analiza una unidad docente de la Escuela de Arquitectura de Valencia que bien podría ser representativa de otras escuelas españolas. Los resultados demuestran que las actividades concretas que acompañan al estudiante en el taller de proyectos son la consecuencia de una reflexión sobre la contemporaneidad del aprendizaje de la arquitectura.
BAc Boletín Académico Revista de investigación y arquitectura contemporánea, 2019
Mies van der Rohe explored the museum project both as an architect and as a teacher, and contribu... more Mies van der Rohe explored the museum project both as an architect and as a teacher, and contributed towards a new way of understanding its meaning: a space for the enjoyment of art. Although critics have already published articles about the museums that Mies created in his office, and analysed them in detail, nothing is known about the academic research he carried out on this type of building. For this reason, the purpose of this article is: to present the museum-projects that Mies supervised on the graduate programme at the IIT -specifically the final master’s theses of Daniel Brenner, Jean Lippert and Peter Carter; to carry out a comparative study of these theses, based on the concepts that Mies himself expressed in the text of the Museum for a Small City; and to explore the constant aspects that are maintained in these spaces destined for the festival of art, establishing connections between the architecture of the Mies, and that of his students.
METU JFA I METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, 2019
This article provides investigation details of teaching architectural design as a fundamental par... more This article provides investigation details of teaching architectural design as a fundamental part of the architectural discipline. This line of research delves into learning about the most creative action of the architectural production process, design, taking into account that creativity must be complemented by disciplinary training that combines both theoretical knowledge and practical skills. Considering these observations, this text provides information about the experience accomplished by four teachers from the School of Architecture of the Universitat Politècnica de València (ETSA-UPV) on the subject of Design Studio 1 for the first-year studies. The propaedeutic character of this subject shows additional difficulties given the complexity of introducing the students into the field of architectural design.
The article begins with a description of the historical background of teaching architecture, contextualizing the object of study and also the different processes used as reference during the accomplishment of the teaching experience. The second section includes a description of basic methodology of the specific case of the first-year subject taught in the ETSA-UPV. It provides analysis of its evolution, detection of the problems and suggested variations of the learning method in order to improve the final results. The canonical teaching method is based on a linear process starting with the theory, followed by architectural analysis, finishing with project synthesis, which generates important doubts for the first-year students when implementing the theory in the project phase. Therefore, resuming the cycle of circular learning studied by David Kolb, several creative practices have been introduced into the subject, where the order of the stages depends on the particular characteristics of each individual and learning takes place by combining practices of perception and comprehension.
Keeping in mind the main goal of the new teaching approach, the third part of the text includes a description of several activities. They are designed using a methodology capable to promote the transfer of knowledge between the analysis phase and the project phase. Creative practices are based on the learning by doing process, where reflection, conceptualization and experimentation are carried out with two basic tools: hand drawing and the three-dimensional model. With the practices and these two manual tools we seek a triple objective for students: to acquire a greater creative capacity, to develop spatial vision and to recognize how materiality affects the definition and perception of space. The methodology of the practices includes thinking with the hands, folding the space, inhabiting the space and building the space, and it is compared to the results obtained during the academic year 2017-2018.
Finally, these results, together with the surveys completed by the students, lead to following conclusions: introducing creative activities in the first year of architectural design has shown a substantial improvement of the work carried out by students and has allowed settling the acquired theoretical knowledge. It helps to understand it not only as concepts that can be observed and analysed in reality, but also as tools of the creative process itself. On the one hand, the construction of models supports intuitive learning, allowing the students to directly recognize the consequences of their actions during the constructive process and its implications in the final result. On the other hand, the activities developed using hand drawing techniques confirm the value of the drawn plans as a tool to define the results and verify their correctness. Experiencing architecture with the hands implicitly involves a work of reflection through which the students are able to understand that space is the actual key element of the architectural project.
ZARCH. Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies of Architecture and Urbanism, 2018
Many critics and historians have spoken about structure in the work of Mies van der Rohe. However... more Many critics and historians have spoken about structure in the work of Mies van der Rohe. However, few have studied the structure from a conceptual point of view, and in comparison with the different facets developed by Mies throughout his professional career. For this reason, this article does not seek to describe or classify the structural solutions used in his work, but instead to delve deeper into Mies' thoughts on the concept of structure and how this was adjusted to his architecture, both through his professional and teaching work. The text firstly analyses the evolution of Mies' concept of structure based on his writings and introduces the term "structural architecture", which summarises his last reflections and was considered by his students and collaborators as the fundamental principle of his architecture. Secondly, the article compa-res two projects tutored by Mies and developed by his students; both have the same typology, a single-family house, corresponding to each of Mies' teaching periods, at the Bauhaus and IIT. The research relates these academic projects with Mies' writings and completed projects, in order to verify whether there is any convergence between the thought of Mies van der Rohe and his work as an architect and as a teacher.
JSAH. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians., 2017
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VLC ARQUITECTURA. Research Journal, 2016
The article delves into the complex world of exhibition architectures, those whose destiny is red... more The article delves into the complex world of exhibition architectures, those whose destiny is reduced to be mounted, exposed and dismantled in a short period of time. A process that allows a quick experience of architecture, bounded in time, and whose experimentation gives rise to the birth of new concepts. The text focuses on the German Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe for the Brussels World’s Fair of 1934, his only unbuilt ephemeral architecture due to the political uniqueness of the moment. Now, criticism and the archive allow us to reinterpret its contribution to the history of architecture.
CLEAN TECHNOLOGIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY, 2014
In recent years, computerized mathematical modelling has enabled construction-related problems to... more In recent years, computerized mathematical modelling has enabled construction-related problems to be resolved and predictions to be made regarding the behaviours of buildings and their environments in a more rigorous fashion than was the case with the deterministic models used until now. This model enables the analysis of a simulation of the sustainability of the use of timber as a major structural component in construction. Thus, using a unique model, which could be adapted to the particular characteristics of any country, the viability of a sustainable use of woodland can be verified, with extraction rates below 100 %, in order to supply an industry which accounts for a high percentage of the carbon dioxide emissions released into the atmosphere. In the specific case of Spain, the demographic forecasts for the next 40 years were used as the basis on which to establish the operational period of the model. For this period, the different variables involved in the natural production of wood were compared, along with felling strategies. The results point to sustainable scenarios for the most part during the target period in Spain, with the most unfavourable combinations of the variables preventing the sustainability of the use of timber from being achieved.
ACE. Architecture, City and Environment., 2014
The 'experimental value' of temporary architectures has the ability to condition the 'memory valu... more The 'experimental value' of temporary architectures has the ability to condition the 'memory value'. Not only that, it also transcends to the permanent architectures that draws on their influences. This conceptual search from "the ephemeral”, enabled to a large extent, the research and development of the works of Mies van der Rohe. A production that, despite its quantitative and qualitative importance, is not referenced in its entirety, nor has there been an in depth study made. This article provides clarity to the exhibition works of Mies van der Rohe, from an archival work: first providing the full list of his exhibition legacy, to date unpublished, and secondly, outlining the foundations tested in "exhibition" scenarios, which were later transferred to his buildings constructed in real environments... ‘Gone with the Wind’ is still in force.
EN BLANCO. Revista de Arquitectura., 2014
The paper presents the contribution promoted by Hidroeléctrica Esapñola S.A. in the field of Span... more The paper presents the contribution promoted by Hidroeléctrica Esapñola S.A. in the field of Spanish collective housing in the first half of the twentieth century. Specifically, it studies the solutions developed in the working colonies which this company built along the Júcar river system in the Castilla-La Mancha community, highlighting among them the linear block of flats with exterior corridor access, named Lucas Urquijo. The aim here is to value this unknown fragment of Spanish architecture.
REVISTA 180, 2013
Mies van der Rohe assumed the temporary architectures as an authentic experimentation workshop, t... more Mies van der Rohe assumed the temporary architectures as an authentic experimentation workshop, the setting where he theorized, tested and modeled the concepts he was later adding remaking and discarding in his permanent buildings. This progressive learning, developed between 1926 and 1927 was done jointly with Lilly Reich as a result of a teamwork barely analyzed by the critic from the point of view of the possible teachings exercised by the designer. She contributed with ideas that Mies interpreted and incorporated in his search towards the essence of architecture. The article values these influences derived resulting from the collaboration among professionals as a method more linked to the architectonic learning; learning that is, to everyone’s knowledge, not limited to the architect’s school period, but transcends and evolves during the architect’s career. Influences, that when it comes to the concrete case of Mies cannot be directly extrapolated, but interpreted. They were part of his formation. Influences that got to mythicize a great deal of interiors, understood by many as exclusively Miesians.
ARQ. Santiago de Chile. , 2013
Two urban projects by Mies van der Rohe, both exhibits, present a vision of modern architecture o... more Two urban projects by Mies van der Rohe, both exhibits, present a vision of modern architecture on the relationship between housing and the city. One is a permanent settlement and the other an ephemeral installation, built within an existing shed.
PPA. Proyecto. Progreso. Arquitectura. , 2013
The article analyses the exhibition Die Wohnung unserer Zeit (The House of Our Time), pertaining ... more The article analyses the exhibition Die Wohnung unserer Zeit (The House of Our Time), pertaining to the Deutsche Bauausstellung (1931 German Construction Exhibition), and explores the possibilities of architectural experimentation that such architecture played in the professional development of Mies van der Rohe. It discusses the potential of this exhibition to act as an ephemeral testing ground, capable of giving constructed form to an idea or concept; an architecture that broke with the expository conventionalisms of the time, becoming an important event in the cultural, historical and architectural sense. The exhibition presented, physically, and on a scale of 1 to 1, the idea that a group of architects of the Modern Movement had about the house of the future, a house conceived and designed with ideas based on the hypothetical individual of the new age.
EGA. Revista de Expresión Gráfica Arquitectónica. , 2013
One of the most important cultural scenes of the last century has been the media, becoming the la... more One of the most important cultural scenes of the last century has been the media, becoming the laboratory of ideas for a large number of architects and artists. Many of the most famous projects had no customer or specific site; their existence came with the excuse of being displayed and their only tangible survival lies in the graphic and photographic documentation of the time. This paper focuses on the specific case of Mies van der Rohe and it analyses two of his methods of graphic expression used in his German architecture: the photomontages peculiar of his 'paper architecture' presented in competitions and the technique of wallpaper, used in some of his exhibitions. These drawn architectures, created for theoretical or temporary contexts, were the ones that gave Mies the necessary impetus to make him one of the most important architects of the twentieth century.
CUADERNOS DE ARTE. Universidad de Granada , 2012
Las arquitecturas expositivas constituyen una parte fundamental de la historia del arte, comportá... more Las arquitecturas expositivas constituyen una parte fundamental de la historia del arte, comportándose como métodos de experimentación ideológica y tecnológica. Es más, durante el siglo XX fueron los primeros escenarios en donde tuvieron lugar nuevas tendencias, estilos e incluso movimientos artísticos. El artículo centra su atención en una pequeña parte de la obra de Mies van der Rohe, en concreto en el Pabellón de la Electricidad y las 25 Muestras de la Industria Alemana, ambos construidos para la Exposición Internacional de Barcelona de 1929; dos proyectos eclipsados por el reconstruido Pabellón Alemán y olvidados por la crítica coetánea y contemporánea.
REVISTA ARCHÉ. The Journal of the Heritage Conservation Institute of the Universitat Politècnica de València, 2011
The article frames the exhibition works of Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for the 1929 Barcelo... more The article frames the exhibition works of Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for the 1929 Barcelona World Fair. It checks the beginnings of the pavilions that emerged in the 19th century and affects in the importance of this typology in the technological and structural evolution of the architecture. Although most of these ephemeral buildings no longer exist or are replicas of the original ones, such as the well-known German pavilion of Barcelona, the text states that they are an important part of the cultural architectural legacy of the 20th century, being precise his conservation. Finally it focuses on German designs of Mies and Reich for the Exhibition of the 29, projects that revolutionized the art of displaying and led to the possibility of experimentation.
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JOURNAL ARTICLES by Laura Lizondo-Sevilla
The article begins with a description of the historical background of teaching architecture, contextualizing the object of study and also the different processes used as reference during the accomplishment of the teaching experience. The second section includes a description of basic methodology of the specific case of the first-year subject taught in the ETSA-UPV. It provides analysis of its evolution, detection of the problems and suggested variations of the learning method in order to improve the final results. The canonical teaching method is based on a linear process starting with the theory, followed by architectural analysis, finishing with project synthesis, which generates important doubts for the first-year students when implementing the theory in the project phase. Therefore, resuming the cycle of circular learning studied by David Kolb, several creative practices have been introduced into the subject, where the order of the stages depends on the particular characteristics of each individual and learning takes place by combining practices of perception and comprehension.
Keeping in mind the main goal of the new teaching approach, the third part of the text includes a description of several activities. They are designed using a methodology capable to promote the transfer of knowledge between the analysis phase and the project phase. Creative practices are based on the learning by doing process, where reflection, conceptualization and experimentation are carried out with two basic tools: hand drawing and the three-dimensional model. With the practices and these two manual tools we seek a triple objective for students: to acquire a greater creative capacity, to develop spatial vision and to recognize how materiality affects the definition and perception of space. The methodology of the practices includes thinking with the hands, folding the space, inhabiting the space and building the space, and it is compared to the results obtained during the academic year 2017-2018.
Finally, these results, together with the surveys completed by the students, lead to following conclusions: introducing creative activities in the first year of architectural design has shown a substantial improvement of the work carried out by students and has allowed settling the acquired theoretical knowledge. It helps to understand it not only as concepts that can be observed and analysed in reality, but also as tools of the creative process itself. On the one hand, the construction of models supports intuitive learning, allowing the students to directly recognize the consequences of their actions during the constructive process and its implications in the final result. On the other hand, the activities developed using hand drawing techniques confirm the value of the drawn plans as a tool to define the results and verify their correctness. Experiencing architecture with the hands implicitly involves a work of reflection through which the students are able to understand that space is the actual key element of the architectural project.
The article begins with a description of the historical background of teaching architecture, contextualizing the object of study and also the different processes used as reference during the accomplishment of the teaching experience. The second section includes a description of basic methodology of the specific case of the first-year subject taught in the ETSA-UPV. It provides analysis of its evolution, detection of the problems and suggested variations of the learning method in order to improve the final results. The canonical teaching method is based on a linear process starting with the theory, followed by architectural analysis, finishing with project synthesis, which generates important doubts for the first-year students when implementing the theory in the project phase. Therefore, resuming the cycle of circular learning studied by David Kolb, several creative practices have been introduced into the subject, where the order of the stages depends on the particular characteristics of each individual and learning takes place by combining practices of perception and comprehension.
Keeping in mind the main goal of the new teaching approach, the third part of the text includes a description of several activities. They are designed using a methodology capable to promote the transfer of knowledge between the analysis phase and the project phase. Creative practices are based on the learning by doing process, where reflection, conceptualization and experimentation are carried out with two basic tools: hand drawing and the three-dimensional model. With the practices and these two manual tools we seek a triple objective for students: to acquire a greater creative capacity, to develop spatial vision and to recognize how materiality affects the definition and perception of space. The methodology of the practices includes thinking with the hands, folding the space, inhabiting the space and building the space, and it is compared to the results obtained during the academic year 2017-2018.
Finally, these results, together with the surveys completed by the students, lead to following conclusions: introducing creative activities in the first year of architectural design has shown a substantial improvement of the work carried out by students and has allowed settling the acquired theoretical knowledge. It helps to understand it not only as concepts that can be observed and analysed in reality, but also as tools of the creative process itself. On the one hand, the construction of models supports intuitive learning, allowing the students to directly recognize the consequences of their actions during the constructive process and its implications in the final result. On the other hand, the activities developed using hand drawing techniques confirm the value of the drawn plans as a tool to define the results and verify their correctness. Experiencing architecture with the hands implicitly involves a work of reflection through which the students are able to understand that space is the actual key element of the architectural project.
Humanity, faced with the need to seek shelter and protection, began
to build. And so, from the moment the first primitive huts appeared,
through different historical periods, the authenticity of the form
and the yardstick used to measure it gradually evolved, becoming
progressively complex as the canons of beauty evolved. However, this
authenticity of form entered into crisis with the arrival of the Modern
Movment, as it sought to return to pure forms. Le Corbusier asserted
that the objectivity of the engineer, compared to the aesthetics of
the architect, was better at capturing or summarising the concerns
of that historical moment. The architect had to be governed by the
spirit of the time, and not by a formal aesthetic. The same concept
was defined at the same time by Mies van der Rohe through his first
manifestos. In a similar way, during the twenty-first century incipient technology
has once again had this effect on our current architecture. Nevertheless,
the majority of us as architects have been incapable of
integrating technological and energy-oriented innovations into our
buildings. In the same way as the Modern Movment was capable of
interpreting its era, and incorporating structure and engineering into
the origins of its architecture, the purpose of this communication is to
try and answer the question of why we have not been able to properly
interpret our era. Function has been overcome: What characterises
the architecture of our period? Where are we heading?
Specifically, this proposal focuses on actions that would offer strategies such as the renewal of infrastructures and services and the adaptive reuse of the built heritage (space recycling, sustainability), the updating of the physical teaching spaces to the new teaching methodologies (European Higher Education Area), and the campus social consideration as a comfortable, conflict-safe and cultural-integrated area.
Beyond the simple conservation, restoration and physical rehabilitation of a set of buildings and a university fabric, this project has the added value of an integrated or interdisciplinary action model that seeks four aspects of innovation: the organizational, the formative, the technological and social. This research proposes to ensure a longer life cycle for the heritage through its participation as a resource in the dynamics of regeneration of the universities.
La Universidad de Sussex diseñada por Basil Spence es de interés por varios motivos: en primer lugar por ser la primera de las siete universidades, considerándose un modelo experimental arquitectónico, social y educativo; en segundo lugar, porque su diseño fue confiado a un arquitecto educado y experimentado en el Modernismo; finalmente por su proceso proyectual, el cual puede ser analizado gracias a la extensa documentación gráfica del proceso custodiada en el Sir Basil Spence Archive.
Por todo ello, el objetivo de esta comunicación es poner en valor la arquitectura la universidad de Sussex a partir del análisis de los documentos existentes. Dibujo y proyecto fueron de la mano en un proceso donde los conceptos e ideas territoriales se coordinaron con la composición impuesta por la retícula geométrica. Las plantas, alzados, secciones y perspectivas del proyecto muestran la huella que la herramienta gráfica fue depositando en el proyecto.
places where students and lecturers coming from different parts of the world work, intensively and during a short period of time, as a team in a specific territory that presents a particular problem. These activities are excellent opportunity spaces to reflect on, to analyse, to transfer culture between the host and the guest countries, and to propose interesting and surprising developments. In addition, in Architecture, and despite the short time the teams have to think, formalize and draw, these workshops include really important topics in terms of urbanism, landscape and territory. Hence, professors and students have to deal with different scales, taking into account several strategies of connection between elements that provide very diverse environmental and cultural values.
Therefore, this communication puts into value the teaching in Urbanism and Architecture through the international workshops, a powerful tool for analysis and urban development. Exemplifying the theory with practice, we present some experiences carried out by different groups of lecturers of the School of Architecture of the Universitat Politècnica de València. Spain, Norway, Morocco and the United Kingdom are some of the places where analysis and reflection have generated a large number of proposals that quickly and effectively solved what the bureaucracy did not achieve in years. The experience of lecturers and the commitment and enthusiasm of the students come together to reformulate the territory and the city.
Although the European period of Mies van der Rohe was caracterized, as a time eminently theoretical, the fact is that he built a large number of temporary architectures; together with Lilly Reich, he designed more than eighty exhibition spaces for the industry and the German government. All these projects were the conceptual basis of his later architecture... which were the reflection and experimentation that served as a laboratory and school. And so, the motivation behind this investigation tries to shed some light on the influence that like Lilly Reich as well as other temporary architects, assumed in the formation and subsequent realization of the constructed work by one of the most important architects in the Twentieth century.
Firstly, the role that Lilly Reich played in the professional life of Mies van der Rohe will be investigated in more detail. No one knows why he kept quiet about his relationship with Lilly Reich. He never mentioned anything about his professional collaboration, privately nor publicly, nor before or after her death in 1947. Neither was the importance that Reich had on the conservation of his drawings, letters, sketches and photographs mentioned. Setting aside Mies silence, it is true that in the year that they began working together was the year in which his professional career was launched; also, and after analysing both their exhibition Works, (before and after her collaboration), it is a fact that his furniture and interior designs show many similarities that were carried out by Reich prior to her solo career. Consequently, a number of questions arise, which have not been solved neither argued in any architectural publication. Was it Lilly Reich who boosted and accelerated the process of the modern architecture in the work of Mies van der Rohe? Which were, if any, the foundations or principles that Mies took from the exhibitions and design of Reich?
The second aspect to be developed in this investigation has to do with the role in which the exhibitions played in the permanent architecture of Mies van der Rohe. Reviewing his European work, we realize that the experimentation stage can be summarized in two fields of research; housing and exhibition space. Both themes, were so up to par, that sometimes we could ask ourselves what conceptual differences exist between the main space of the Tugendhat house and the Barcelona Pavilion?”, or between any of those spaces and dwellings for the Exhibition of the Berlin Building in 1931. Can the exhibition architecture be considered within the same typology as that of permanent architecture, differed only by their location, - either inside existing buildings or real locations with a certain client- and whether or not they could be dismounted? What is the difference between the character of exhibition architecture of Mies and the architectural character of his exhibitions? Where is the limit between the architecture and the exhibition? Starting from Mies’ idea to highlight the character of “architectural” above the “exhibition” what will be identified in this discourse are the concepts that Mies experimented with in his exhibitions and then transferred to the actual architecture; in others words and to paraphrase the title of this thesis, what are the foundations of Mies architecture that were born in the contexts of these exhibitions…