KEITH PEIFFER FACULTY SCHOLARSHIP:

Demonstrated through design awards and academic scholarship, the discipline of architecture tends to celebrate and elevate custom, unique, and one-off conditions and solutions. However, standard details are ubiquitous in contemporary architecture, common in many of the buildings we occupy every day. Despite their extensive use, there is limited scholarly attention given to theorizing their role. Drawing from his experience in professional practice, Assistant Professor Keith Peiffer is interested in considering the gaps between the standard and the custom, in both material selection and detailing. One way that he is currently exploring this topic is through a speculative design project that proposes a reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. The Pavilion is especially compelling for this work because it was temporarily constructed for the International Exposition in Barcelona in 1929 and painstakingly reconstructed in 1986. The building’s reconstruction offered a second chance to execute the “same” building, and the reconstruction architects deliberately chose to create a pure, idealized version of the original building.

In his proposed redesign, Keith embraces the often overlooked reality of the budget-challenged, improvisational, contingent process of the original pavilion. In designing a third iteration of this significant work of architecture, he is using only standard details and materials as an intentional provocation to consider the discipline’s often unstated value systems and preferences. As part of this ongoing project, he will be presenting a paper at the upcoming Building Technology Educators’ Society (BTES) conference that discusses the three iterations (the original, the reconstruction, and his speculative redesign) of the pavilion and in particular, the selection of the onyx dore stone used for the wall at the heart of the pavilion.