The Psicoarquitectura project is developed in two acts; the first as an introduction and reference framework, and the second results in the artistic intervention that is incorporated into the framework of the Pavilion that inspired the initial reflection.
The artist takes as a reference point the symmetrical shapes created on the surfaces of the Pavilion and makes a parallel with the shapes of the sheets that the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) created by folding a sheet with an ink stain as a projective method. to evaluate and diagnose the person looking at them based on what they see. The responses that are generated in the attempt to give figurative meaning to the ambiguity of forms reveal the aspects of mental life implicit in the act of knowing. In the same way, Oscar Abraham Pabón proposes a turn that takes us from the object to interpreting the interpreted subject.
Artistic intervention.
In the second act, Oscar Abraham Pabón presents us with the materialization of a wall over the large pond of the Pavilion made of blocks of baked earth (Calibric ONE). On the surface of the wall, there is a drawing of a new ink stain made from its interpretative possibilities and that is interrelated with the Pavilion and with its own reflection that duplicates it in the water.
Psicoarquitectura, by Oscar Abraham Pabón, in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. Photograph by Anna Mas.
The clay block is offered as an object of interpretation, where the wall is approached as a surface or skin that, showing itself at the different levels of the layers that make it up, makes it tangible and brings an internal dimension to the surface; which involves both the construction history of the material and its role in 20th-century architecture and urban planning. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe himself used brick as a structural material and for its aesthetic characteristics in some of his works simultaneous to the Barcelona Pavilion such as the Haus Lange and the Haus Esters in Krefeld.
As Werner Blaser highlighted in Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure, "The structure of a brick wall begins already with the smallest divisible unit: the brick." This basic unit is now transferred to the Pavilion, emphasizing the relationship between structure, materiality, and beauty, in this case with a free-standing wall.
The artist takes as a reference point the symmetrical shapes created on the surfaces of the Pavilion and makes a parallel with the shapes of the sheets that the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) created by folding a sheet with an ink stain as a projective method. to evaluate and diagnose the person looking at them based on what they see. The responses that are generated in the attempt to give figurative meaning to the ambiguity of forms reveal the aspects of mental life implicit in the act of knowing. In the same way, Oscar Abraham Pabón proposes a turn that takes us from the object to interpreting the interpreted subject.
Artistic intervention.
In the second act, Oscar Abraham Pabón presents us with the materialization of a wall over the large pond of the Pavilion made of blocks of baked earth (Calibric ONE). On the surface of the wall, there is a drawing of a new ink stain made from its interpretative possibilities and that is interrelated with the Pavilion and with its own reflection that duplicates it in the water.
Psicoarquitectura, by Oscar Abraham Pabón, in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. Photograph by Anna Mas.
The clay block is offered as an object of interpretation, where the wall is approached as a surface or skin that, showing itself at the different levels of the layers that make it up, makes it tangible and brings an internal dimension to the surface; which involves both the construction history of the material and its role in 20th-century architecture and urban planning. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe himself used brick as a structural material and for its aesthetic characteristics in some of his works simultaneous to the Barcelona Pavilion such as the Haus Lange and the Haus Esters in Krefeld.
As Werner Blaser highlighted in Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure, "The structure of a brick wall begins already with the smallest divisible unit: the brick." This basic unit is now transferred to the Pavilion, emphasizing the relationship between structure, materiality, and beauty, in this case with a free-standing wall.
«If the German pavilion of 1929 symbolizes the future of the modern house, the “Psychoarchitecture” proposal could offer an interpretation of the future of that modernity, but now from a psychic and somatized dimension, I understand the clay brick as a skin that covers "A good part of the architecture and the city inherited from the modern project."
Oscar Abraham Pabón
