In 1929 the German government sent Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Barcelona to build a pavilion that would represent the young Weimar Republic: modern, democratic, at peace with the world eleven years after the war that had broken it. What he built held almost nothing. A reflecting pool. A smaller courtyard pool with a bronze figure. Planes of glass and coloured stone standing free of one another, so that walking through the building meant walking through a sequence of views rather than a sequence of rooms. Critics at the 1929 exposition singled it out immediately, and it has never left the short list of the twentieth century's most important buildings since.
For most of that century, the Pavilion, and the chrome-and-leather chair made for it, belonged to Mies alone. That was never the whole truth. Lilly Reich, a designer with her own career already built by the time she met Mies, worked with him as his closest professional partner from 1925 until his emigration in 1937. She had joined the Deutscher Werkbund in 1912 and become the first woman on its governing board in 1920, a decade of standing in German design before the Pavilion was ever commissioned. On the Barcelona project she is now credited with shaping the interior fittings and, alongside Mies, the chair that would eventually carry the building's name, though Knoll did not formally call it the Barcelona chair until 1987, decades after both designers were gone.
Why did her name drop out of the record? Partly the ordinary mechanics of twentieth-century credit, which routed toward the named architect and away from the collaborator, especially a woman collaborator, whatever the working reality had been. Partly Reich's own history: her Berlin studio was bombed in 1943, she was conscripted into forced labour before the war's end, and she died in 1947 with little chance to shape how her own career would be remembered, while Mies lived another twenty-two years building a second, celebrated career in America. It took the Museum of Modern Art's 1996 exhibition on her work, and the research that has followed it, to put her name back on the wall beside his.
None of this makes the Pavilion less Mies's building. It makes it, more accurately, theirs: a lesson in how a single credited name can flatten a genuine partnership, and in how long it can take to put the second name back.