Spinning Pins

Unhinged pin:

"In the Museum of Modern Art catalogue accompanying the 2001 exhibition 'Mies in Berlin,' a hand-tinted print of one of these photographs is accompanied by a caption that states, 'Glass Skyscraper Project—No intended site known.' Current research strongly suggests that Mies did not intend for the photographs to be understood as portraying a particular place; the model was intended as a proposal for a new theory of light in architecture. Yet Mies took the unusual step of placing his design in what appears to be a real site, replete both with history and evocations of nature. The caption that the catalogue gives the project seems to imply that it is for no place. This impression is paradoxical. The thirty-story building clearly stands in a somewhere, and yet that somewhere is considered a nowhere."

~Josiah McElheney