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so we could talk about the art museums, how i like miró now, or how the only floor of the contemporary art museum open during rehanging packed in more than three normal museums. but boy i want to talk about architecture.

we found out that in the huge montjuic park, along with tons of other stuff, like the miro museum, is mies van der rohe's german pavilion from the 1929 international expo. some better photos than i took. he's one of the early defining modernist architects and i've been in love with some of his other buildings for a while but never seen any in person. this was billed as being one of the most important too, so i was really excited.

well, it definitely lived up to reputation, for good and bad. mostly it's a few low rectangle walls, some glass and some marble, barely holding up a rectangle roof. there's a couple shallow reflecting pools too. you can't get any sparser. it was shocking for being so barely there, yet so strongly defining the space it was in. you had to look hard to see it, but not to feel it. it's hard to photograph for exactly this reason. the difficult part for me was remembering that it was designed for people to stroll through, sip cocktails, and talk about Important things, not to live in. it works great for that, but it was so incredibly impractical for anything resembling normal human occupation. and that spun me out drawing parallels of course to writing software.

there's nothing nicer than looking at a clean algorithm, clean code where you can see the structure laid out and logical saying just what it does for anyone to read. it explains itself in the minimum number of words. that's the code everyone wants to write and read. but if you feed that code something it wasn't expecting, like "orange" instead of -34, all hell breaks loose and it collapses into a smoking pile. for instance: the pavilion didn't have a welcome mat to wipe your feet on when you walked in. i understand architecturally why it didn't, but at some point, someone's got to interact with the mathematical purity, and that's just going to mess things up unless you take care to check your input.

facing that building was facing the impracticality of idealism and that hurt. i knew i had the same fundamental problem with building. you can get away with it for a single-use structure whose point is idealism, but the real world doesn't permit living buildings or living code to operate like that. in living things, robustness is a virtue. being able to accept what the world throws at you, having that integral to the design is a different, maybe lesser, kind of beauty, but it's what we're stuck with.