Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Late in 1928, Mies van der Rohe began to design the pavilion that would represent Germany at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, the first such event in which the country had participated since its defeat in World War I. The democratically elected postwar government had made its aspirations for the pavilion clear: the building was to represent "our desire to be absolutely truthful, giving voice to the spirit of a new era." The state made few other demands, leaving Mies free to pursue his most radical architectural expression of free-flowing space, bounded only by rich but abstract surfaces of Tinian marble, mirror chrome, plate glass, and onyx.
Since the pavilion was demolished when the fair was over, relatively few later audiences and architectural critics had ever seen the building except through the filter of period black-and-white photographs, and its significance became largely a matter of thirdhand debate rather than actual experience. In time it came to be interpreted in terms of Mies's later, more rational work of the 1940s and later, often derided as simple "glass boxes".