There is no doubt that the construction of the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe was designed to reaffirm the Modern Movement. This "icon" of the movement, deeply embedded in the architectural imagination, was built to be ephemeral. At the end of the International Exposition, the pavilion was dismantled; however, it was reconstructed 54 years later, sparking a debate within the architectural field regarding the authenticity of this replica.
One of the responses to this reconstruction—or rather, falsification—was the construction that same year of the Casa Palestra by OMA. Participating in the 17th Triennale di Milano, OMA built the Casa Palestra as another replica of Mies's Pavilion. A distorted and dysfunctional copy, functioning as a successful postmodern gesture, it challenged and created tension with the movement that preceded it. This text proposes a brief discussion of both works and their influence on the debate between modernism and postmodernism.
