Diachronic Pavilion. Variations of the «Pabellón de la República Española»

Abstract

The reconstruction of the Pabellón de la República Española completed in 1992 by Juan Miguel Hernández León, and Miquel Espinet and Antoni Ubach in Barcelona includes omissions and additions that were not part of the pavilion built in 1937 by Luis Lacasa and Josep Lluís Sert. This article look does not look at these differences as unconscious mistakes or absentminded omissions. Instead, it reads them as material evidence of the historiographical arguments around the origins of Spanish modern architecture that emerged during the country’s transition to democracy. This approach allows abandoning discussions over the faithfulness of the reproduction, to analyse the relationship between the pavilions in terms of trajectory (Latour, 2010) or inframince (Banz, 2019) opening up the discussion of the cultural relevance of architectural copies.