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A European Baedeker

The Fundació Mies van der Rohe has compiled an exceptional 800-page volume containing the results of every edition of the award founded in 1988. It is a tour of the “best” architectures that, in their diversity, have helped to shape the European territory.

Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero (eds), Atlas. Contemporary European Architecture, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2016, pages 864.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Mies’s reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion, the foundation bearing his name has published a monumental book of over 800 pages containing the results of every edition of the prize established in 1988.

An exceptional publishing venture, particularly for today, the Contemporary European Architecture Atlas is motivated by the fact that since 2001 the Mies Award has been the European Union’s official architecture prize. As a result, the prize initially conceived by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe now enjoys support from the Creative Europe programme. Since its beginnings, the award has been founded on excellence, diversity and the urban dimension, with the latter understood programmatically as a contribution to the “survival of the European city”. The jury, which changes for each edition, indentifies four finalists, a winning project and, since 2001, an emerging architect. Over the years, the field of investigation has widened in parallel with the growth of the European Union, from the 70 projects nominated in 1988 to the 420 of the latest edition in 2015.

Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero (eds), Atlas. Contemporary European Architecture, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2016

Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero (eds), Atlas. Contemporary European Architecture, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2016

Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero (eds), Atlas. Contemporary European Architecture, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2016

Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero (eds), Atlas. Contemporary European Architecture, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2016

Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero (eds), Atlas. Contemporary European Architecture, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2016

Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero (eds), Atlas. Contemporary European Architecture, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2016

Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero (eds), Atlas. Contemporary European Architecture, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2016

Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero (eds), Atlas. Contemporary European Architecture, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2016

As its title suggests, the book’s impressive feat of classification organises the 2,881 projects (nominees, finalists and winners) into the form of an atlas, i.e. systematised knowledge, grouping them into four macro categories (housing, society, structure, and production and consumption). The maps and diagrams provide a great deal of information – also in historical sequence – such as the projects’ distribution by country and programme, geographical location and urban context, or indications on the size of the architectural interventions. Of equal interest is the data concerning the architects, which, among other things, tells us about the mobility and size of the studios, their ownership, classification by genre, etc. Such details help to compose a first significant inventory of European architecture, offering a springboard for further inquiries and reflections, some of which are suggested by the engaging contributions that accompany the project presentations.

As underlined by the geographer Francesc Muñoz, cities have undergone a radical transformation in the last three decades, in Europe as elsewhere. The same timeframe has also witnessed a profound crisis in architecture’s organic interpretations of the urban phenomenon. Despite the extremely diverse typological and topological contexts in which the nominated projects are located, Muñoz identifies a common trait in their capacity to impact not only the physical urban space, but also the relational sphere of the social context. But this inventory mustn’t be confused with a reliable map of urban transformations in Europe. For example, it might be understandable that the prize’s most represented programme is culture in a broad sense (and it totally steals the show if we also include the education category). Yet, as Muxì and Montaner point out, the various editions have paid strikingly little attention to collective residential projects – even when faced with significant accomplishments in this field. Responsibility for this omission can be attributed to judgements that are still eminently based on questions of form.

It is even more complicated to assess the consistency of national representations. The scarcely incisive Italian presence merits a pause for thought, with the country notching up just three finalists in fourteen editions, two of whom were foreigners. Of course, it’s worth remembering that the award’s history runs hand in hand with the European political agenda, first of all with the geographical expansion of the EU zone (hence the inescapable contributions of Swiss architects are excluded for solely political reasons). But this influence clearly also spreads to the complicated and delicate mechanism of adjudication and, even more so, of the selection, which today includes national professional orders alongside architecture museums and lists of “experts”, who are difficult to define at a time when the common cultural horizon evoked by Dietmar Steiner seems to have dissolved.

In the form of a personal story, Steiner outlines what is now a historical map of European architectural culture, recalling the ties built on relationships of mutual esteem that united many leading figures from the world of design – theorists and practicing architects, historians and critics, from Italy to Spain, Switzerland to Austria and Germany to Portugal. In the 1980s, this unique cultural ferment turned Barcelona – a cultured, cosmopolitan, participatory and open metropolis – into the quintessential paradigm of the European city. And it was that same energy that flowed into the prize dedicated to Mies van der Rohe. Still today, the award sets out to foster architectural quality while contributing to the development of contemporary European identity, with an invitation to tour the “best” architectures that, in their diversity, have helped to shape their territory.

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