Introduction (1985), Peter Smithson

«When the Barcelona Pavilion was new it spoke for an idea. At the beginning of this century the experience of living in the poor quarters of big cities with their drifts of ordure, their smells, their cacophony of noise, the pressure of people and the sense engendered of being trapped deeply affected those who came to them from gentler places. […]

Upper Lawn was placed in an eighteenth-century English landscape with the conscious intention of enjoying its pleasures, its history, of submitting to its seasons, admitting to the melancholy that seasons and quietness can entrain.

This pavilion is a true child of the English poetic tradition: in it we lived out part of our lives in a special way. The pavilion was designed as a device whose pattern of habitation could change … a setting of rooms and small garden spaces which could be tuned to the seasons, to the changes in the pattern of family-use, to the changes in one’s sensibilities.

Upper Lawn was a device for trying things out on oneself. […]

But Upper Lawn ‘possesses’ its landscape in a different way to the pavilion of the Swedish King at Drottningholm. We have to submit now, without escape, to wholly different levels of disturbance … helicopters carrying Brigadiers home for luncheon, Concorde flying at low altitudes under test, motorcycle gang outings, car rallies or just citizens in their cars on Sunday afternoons. Submit to a level of disturbance far from the noise of the tracks / paths by his cabin where Thoreau found such a comfort on cold winter nights knowing how close he was to Boston and how easily he could escape his solitude.

Noise, intrusion, removes from the pavilion in a tamed-nature its power to re-generate through isolation by choice … for that choice no longer exists. […]

The impulse now is to establish a territory under one’s own control or that of one’s self-chosen group.

That is why the phrase ‘fragment of an enclave’ is used as the carrier towards the ‘pavilion’ of our period.»