course, but you know itâs not the same thing. Berlin resembles New York. You have to see the new neighborhoods with workersâ housing, the big department stores, the lights at night. Things we dreamed about at the School in the middle of the disaster seem to have become reality. A few, not many. But you know how something well made, even if small, can make a difference.â
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The value of objects, instruments, tools. The beauty of the pavilion that took oneâs breath away, staggered the soul, something tangible and of this world though it seemed not to belong to it entirely, too pure perhaps, too perfect in the purity of its right angles and smooth surfaces, alien not only to most of the other buildings in the Exposition but to reality itself, to the raw light and harshness of life in Spain. There may be a depraved, baroque quality in poverty, just as there is in ostentation. One September morning in 1929, Ignacio Abel strolled with Professor Rossman through the German pavilion, where hammers still sounded and laborers were hard at work, where footsteps and voices echoed in the uninhabited spaces, and he noticed a sting of skepticism in his own enthusiasm. Or perhaps it was simply resentment at not being able to imagine anything similar, a building that would justify his life even though it was destined to be demolished after a few months. Like a brilliant composition that wonât be played again after its premiere, the score would remain, perhaps a recording, the inexact recollections of those who heard it. Active, loquacious, attentive to everything, Professor Rossman supervised the construction so that everything would be ready when his colleague Mies van der Rohe arrived from Germany, and afterward Rossman toured Barcelona with his wife and daughter, whom he photographed in front of GaudÃâs buildings, which seemed to him nonsensical, yet were endowed with a beauty that struck him all the more because it contradicted all his own principles. His wife was fat, short, and phlegmatic, his daughter tall, thin, and ungainly, with an intense look behind her gold-framed eyeglasses. And Professor Rossman between the two, cheerful to no end, asking a passerby to take a picture of the three of them, extolling buildings and views that neither mother nor daughter looked at, praising the local delicacies they both wolfed down mindlessly, waiting for an opportunity to drop them off at the hotel and allow himself to be carried downriver to the port by the human current on the Ramblas.
Â
âHow are your wife and children? A boy and a girl, isnât that so? I remember your showing me pictures of them when we were in Weimar and they were very small. Still too young to argue politics with you. My wife misses the kaiser and feels sympathy for Hitler. The only defect she finds in him is that heâs so anti-Semitic. And my daughter belongs to the Communist Party. She lives in a house with central heating and hot water but longs for a communal apartment in Moscow. She hates Hitler, but much less than she hates the Social Democrats, including me: she must think Iâm the worst of the bunch. What a magnificent Freudian drama to be the daughter of a Social Fascist, a Social Imperialist. Perhaps deep down my daughter admires Hitler just as much as her mother does, and the only defect she finds in him is that heâs so anti-Communist.â Professor Rossman laughed with some benevolence, as if at heart he attributed the muddled politics of his wife and daughter to a certain congenital intellectual weakness of the female mind, or as if over the years heâd developed a tolerance somewhere between being resigned to and sardonic about the extremes of human foolishness. âBut tell me what youâre working on now, my friend, what projects you have. Iâm happy to know youâre completely innocent of the esthetic crime that is the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition.â Professor
Â
The value of objects, instruments, tools. The beauty of the pavilion that took oneâs breath away, staggered the soul, something tangible and of this world though it seemed not to belong to it entirely, too pure perhaps, too perfect in the purity of its right angles and smooth surfaces, alien not only to most of the other buildings in the Exposition but to reality itself, to the raw light and harshness of life in Spain. There may be a depraved, baroque quality in poverty, just as there is in ostentation. One September morning in 1929, Ignacio Abel strolled with Professor Rossman through the German pavilion, where hammers still sounded and laborers were hard at work, where footsteps and voices echoed in the uninhabited spaces, and he noticed a sting of skepticism in his own enthusiasm. Or perhaps it was simply resentment at not being able to imagine anything similar, a building that would justify his life even though it was destined to be demolished after a few months. Like a brilliant composition that wonât be played again after its premiere, the score would remain, perhaps a recording, the inexact recollections of those who heard it. Active, loquacious, attentive to everything, Professor Rossman supervised the construction so that everything would be ready when his colleague Mies van der Rohe arrived from Germany, and afterward Rossman toured Barcelona with his wife and daughter, whom he photographed in front of GaudÃâs buildings, which seemed to him nonsensical, yet were endowed with a beauty that struck him all the more because it contradicted all his own principles. His wife was fat, short, and phlegmatic, his daughter tall, thin, and ungainly, with an intense look behind her gold-framed eyeglasses. And Professor Rossman between the two, cheerful to no end, asking a passerby to take a picture of the three of them, extolling buildings and views that neither mother nor daughter looked at, praising the local delicacies they both wolfed down mindlessly, waiting for an opportunity to drop them off at the hotel and allow himself to be carried downriver to the port by the human current on the Ramblas.
Â
âHow are your wife and children? A boy and a girl, isnât that so? I remember your showing me pictures of them when we were in Weimar and they were very small. Still too young to argue politics with you. My wife misses the kaiser and feels sympathy for Hitler. The only defect she finds in him is that heâs so anti-Semitic. And my daughter belongs to the Communist Party. She lives in a house with central heating and hot water but longs for a communal apartment in Moscow. She hates Hitler, but much less than she hates the Social Democrats, including me: she must think Iâm the worst of the bunch. What a magnificent Freudian drama to be the daughter of a Social Fascist, a Social Imperialist. Perhaps deep down my daughter admires Hitler just as much as her mother does, and the only defect she finds in him is that heâs so anti-Communist.â Professor Rossman laughed with some benevolence, as if at heart he attributed the muddled politics of his wife and daughter to a certain congenital intellectual weakness of the female mind, or as if over the years heâd developed a tolerance somewhere between being resigned to and sardonic about the extremes of human foolishness. âBut tell me what youâre working on now, my friend, what projects you have. Iâm happy to know youâre completely innocent of the esthetic crime that is the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition.â Professor
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