Just this Wednesday I was talking at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion with Pol Esteve and Marina Povedano, both architects and thinkers, gathered around the project Plou prou?, an activation of the well-known building that collects and reuses rainwater to transform it into a habitable fountain on Montjuïc: a place to enter, stay, share, and generate community. The installation, conceived by Cierto Estudio, HRO Architects, and Metrònom, aims to raise questions about the origin of water, the hidden infrastructures that bring it to us, and the need to rethink its management beyond its immediate use and daily convenience: the idea is to make visible the volume of water that evaporates from the pavilion's pool — in which, you will recall, the mayoral candidates dipped their feet in the 2019 campaign — through tanks that refill the disappeared water with phreatic water volume. Talking with Pol and Marina, beyond rambling about the poeticity of gesture and the performative nature of contemporary art, I discovered that, when it was conceived, the Mies pond could have been full of life (microbes, water lilies), but that modern architecture, towards the end of the fifties, turned it into the most significant monument of the era and a visual icon, according to Povedano, detached from "its material, environmental, and temporal conditions", and "turned into a pure, autonomous, and immutable object". Today it is still this kind of museographical mummy, and the pond, a mirror in which it can be reflected: a surface that doubles its beauty, but denies life. It turns out that in 2021, the architects explained, Andrés Jaque proposed an intervention, Phantom: Mies as Rendered Society, in which he showed the public the hidden materials that allowed the pavilion to be maintained in those conditions of conservation and control: the architect dismantled the building's basement and revealed the ghost that maintains, for example, the crystalline water without a single alga. In a way, it revealed that form had won over substance. After the conversation, a little disoriented (a writer among architects trying to save the type by talking to them about the poems of rain and water by Verdaguer and Carner), I thought about all the places in the city that, like the pavilion, have this cosmetic thing that pushes life away: Plaça dels Àngels, les Rambles, Plaça Universitat... and each person could go on listing places according to their daily routes. Some will speak of Plaça dels Països Catalans, in Sants, or Plaça de Lesseps, in Gràcia; and we could write a very long list, but that's not the point now, but rather to understand that what these places have in common is that they have become spaces that, like Mies's pond, reflect their own image and little else. And that, little by little, or more quickly, in some cases, they have displaced life from places where, initially, the idea was that there would be life. Perhaps that's why they have become mere transit zones, in the best of cases, or reliquary monuments where one only goes to pilgrimage. What is most frightening, however, is how these places will continue to transform with new challenges such as, as we see now, impractical summers: elderly people no longer sitting in the cool of the benches, children no longer playing ball under the scorching sun, neighbors no longer meeting. Where will the old be accompanied? Where will the children play, what will their summers be like? And who will we end up talking to when returning from shopping, or on the way to the market, if someone brings the shopping home to us, avoiding the streets? They are naive questions, I know, but no less urgent for that. Perhaps someone like Andrés Jaque should exhibit the hidden, subterranean mechanisms that shape the city this way, and that life is evicted from the spaces where it was expected. Or, on second thought, we have it all in front of us and it is we who do not want to look.
