Critical Realism: Life and Form Avant-garde: Art and Life

6 Introduction

Critical Realism: Life and Form 14 Apprenticeship in Reform 20 Riehl House: Country House Critical Realism 32 Bismarck Memorial: Form and Space 44 Kröller-Müller Villa: Living Geometry

Avant-garde: Art and Life 58 Glass Skyscraper: New Beginnings 82 Good Forms for New Types 92 Esters and Lange Houses: New Language 114 Weissenhofsiedlung: Urban Montage

Task: Mastering Modernity 138 Barcelona Pavilion: Spiritualizing Technology 168 Tugendhat House: An Elevated Personal Life 182 Neue Wache: In the World and Against It 194 Bauhaus Education 210 Reichsbank: In Dark Times

Organic Architecture 232 Resor House: Autonomy 244 AIT/IIT: Open Campus 258 IIT: Clear Construction

Unfolding Structure 282 Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span 314 860–880 Lake Shore Drive: High Rise 338 Seagram Building: Dark Building 364 50 x 50 House to New National Gallery: Variations and Permutations 400 Lafayette Park: City Landscape

444 Event Space: Living Life Large

468 Notes 506 Bibliography 530 Index

20 Critical Realism: Life and Form

Riehl House: Country House Critical Realism

In 1906 Bruno Paul recommended Mies to the philosopher Alois Riehl and his wife, Sophie, who were looking to build a quiet house for summers, weekends and their imminent retirement in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Potsdam-Neubabelsberg 008. Riehl was a celebrat-ed professor of philosophy at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, and the Riehls became Mies’s first patrons. Although the reasons for the clients’ trust in this relatively untested young man remain unclear, Mies was sufficiently confident in his experience to take up the challenge. Like the architect, the Riehls were clearly aware of the reform movements then influencing the design of housing and the applied arts, but they eschewed the idea of marrying art and life – an idea that had underpinned Jugendstil’s efforts to increase the sensuous pleasure of everyday experience. They also eschewed the pursuit of a total work of art. Rather, the couple took a more ascetic approach, similar to the sober and practical Arts and Crafts movement in England. They embraced the idea of the country house as a build-ing type directed at achieving a healthy and calm way of life, lived on the land. The house was to provide not only an antidote to the con-gested and insalubrious metropolis but also an alternative to the typical suburban villa: it was to provide a place in which life and conversation could freely unfold.

The Riehls’ relationship with Mies went much further than is typical of the client-architect relationship, for they treated him as a son. They nurtured his personal intellectual development, sent him on a study trip to Italy and introduced him to intellectual society in Berlin. Through them Mies also developed a close friendship with Alois Riehl’s pro-tégé Eduard Spranger, whom the couple also considered an adopted son.1 The house, completed in 1907, proved to be a remarkably ac-complished debut for a twenty year old from the provinces, who lacked higher education and had barely two years in Berlin. Dependent on existing conventions, it was nevertheless an ingenious transformation of precedents and contained many ideas that Mies would develop in new directions later. The house was immediately published and rec-ognized by critics.2

Whereas the neighbouring villas were built as Italian or German Re-naissance icons set within miniature picturesque gardens, the Riehl House was designed by Mies as a simple neo-Biedermeier block adapted to the local vernacular. Its rectangular mass of light ochre stucco was surmounted by a steeply peaked gable roof with eyebrow dormers 007, 010–012. Devoid of superfluous ornament, the house was defined by the tautness and geometric clarity of its volumes and the robust detailing of its balconies, windows and doors. Ornament was reserved for the centre of the entrance front, which features an elegant stucco interlace of wreaths. On the interior bright simple rooms were well proportioned; constructed of modest yet durable materials, they were well built yet spare. For all its studied modesty and simplicity, however, the house is remarkably subtle and complex.

Rotated on the site and pushed to one side, the building does not face the street directly but rather recedes to make room for a formal flower garden, which serves as a space of reception and orientation. As a result the path leading from the street to the house first offers a panoramic view of the landscape beyond. The level plane on which both house and garden sit was created by terracing the site, which slopes dramatically down towards the picturesque Lake Griebnitz and the extensive landscape park of Potsdam. While the long axis of the formal garden links the street with the distant view, the cross axis leads, on the left, to the entrance of the house and, on the right, to the stairway and lower gardens.

The site’s design exemplified the planning principles promoted for country houses by Hermann Muthesius, who had studied the emer-gence of the type in England and its suitability for Germany 015. Muthesius characterized metropolitan life in terms of hotel living, congestion, disorder and alienation from the land. In contrast, the country house offered landownership, clean air, quiet and a calm setting for personal and family life. He favoured spending evenings at home playing the piano over attending concerts as more educa-tional and character building. For the bourgeoisie the country house

became the locus for an alternative way of life. Critical of placing houses as features in the centre of their lots and treating the garden as a residual fragment of a picturesque landscape, Muthesius argued that gardens should be designed to be lived in. They should be open-air equivalents to living rooms that could be used for dining, bathing and even sleeping 016. The Riehl House was included in the second edition of Muthesius’s book Landhaus und Garten (Country House and Garden) in 1910.3

The functional reciprocity between inside and outside was to be matched formally by subsuming both building and garden within an overarching architectural unity 009. The garden reform movement promoted an ‘architectonic’ garden, which featured axial planning, geometric planting and lattice trellises that made the garden more architectural. At the same time, natural species, sturdy perennials and ivy were reintroduced into common use to display nature’s wildness against the foil of mathematical form. This kind of garden was devel-oped in Germany by Paul Schultze-Naumburg (1869–1949) as well as Muthesius and in Austria by Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867–1908) and Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956).

Writing just after the turn of the century, Muthesius recognized that the country house was still too expensive to be available to anyone but the elite. Its dissemination would come in time but was contingent on the reform of land tenure, the end of land speculation, improve-ments to transportation (especially the railway), and the integration of industrialized methods of house construction. Given the opportu-nity to organize a model housing estate for the German Werkbund in 1927 – the famous Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart – Mies initially envisioned an entire fabric of country houses with integrated gardens for middle-class families.

Although scholars and critics have paid little attention to Mies’s gar-dens – some even edited them out of photographs and drawings – Barry Bergdoll recently showed how profoundly important they were

Riehl House: Country House Critical Realism 21

007 Ludwig Mies, Riehl House, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg, 1906–7; entrance from the upper walled garden

008 Ludwig Mies at the Riehl house, ca.1912

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013 014

010 012009

Riehl House: Country House Critical Realism 23

009 Riehl House; site plan with ground floor plan

010 Riehl House; view from street

011 Riehl House; view from the lower garden

012 Riehl House; ground and upper floor plans

013 Karl Foerster, autochrome of the Riehl House garden terrace and panorama beyond; published in his Winter-

harte Blütenstauden und Sträucher der Neuzeit (Hardy Blooming Shrubs and Bushes for Today), 1911

014 Riehl House; view of central, multipurpose hall, ca. 1907


Bismarck Memorial: Form and Space

By 1905 the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935) would recognize that Behrens had launched a new Renaissance with his designs for the ‘Garden and Art Exhibition’ in Düsseldorf (1904), the ‘Northwest German Art Exhibition’ at Oldenburg (1904–5) 023, 024 and the read-ing room of the Düsseldorf City Library (1904). This was not, he said, a literal reprise of the Italian Renaissance, nor an evocation of Rome, but the expression of a more universal classicism – rational, elemen-tal, Sachlich (objective).6 Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) suggested that art developed historically by alternating between linear or geometric styles such as the Renaissance, with its closed, clear, individuated but lifeless forms, and painterly styles such as the Baroque, with its open, ambiguous, melded-together and enlivened forms.7 The Viennese historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905) concluded similarly that new styles typically begin with a geometric phase.8 Behrens focused on the logic of composition, which could be seen to underpin not only the Vitruvian tradition but also the Gothic and Egyptian. He developed an astylar geometry that sought to be at once radically modern and radically archaic, sophisticated and primitive, timeless and timely. Extending his new paradigm beyond the domestic realm, his exhibi-tion grounds were even more ambitious in their projections of an artistic totality, effectively transforming the crystal from a symbolic figure into a stereometric medium, still charged with transformative and transcendental powers. The forms and dimensions of site works, buildings, furniture, pergolas, benches, lamps and even plantings were assimilated into a single formal system – a remarkable demon-stration that the principles of the architectonic garden could be placed in the service of a transcendental artistic totality.

Behrens’s system employed modularity and proportion, continuities across scales and materials, and sharp outlines of individuated geo-metric forms and elements; all techniques that Mies would later use. Solid and heavy, Behrens’s elemental masses were rendered with such extreme tautness that they became schematic and paradoxi-cally thin, even light. Through abstraction they became materially ambiguous, ethereal and otherworldly. Stone-like in form but not in

Bismarck Memorial: Form and Space 33

Seeking to expand his practice beyond furniture and interiors to include entire buildings, Bruno Paul hired the architect Paul Thiersch (1879–1928) to manage his studio in 1907.1 Thiersch came from a family of Munich architects and had been working in Düsseldorf for Peter Behrens, whose new classicism had greatly impressed him.2 Like Behrens, Wilhelm Kreis (1873–1955), Fritz Schumacher (1869–1947) and other young architects, Thiersch longed for a strong monumen-tal architecture that would be in tune with the rhythm of the times yet would fulfil a desire for antiquity’s feeling for life, reuniting spirit, soul and body in a way that had thus far eluded modern efforts. Thiersch’s own later work favoured the expression of powerful masses with smooth uninterrupted surfaces regulated by harmonic proportions. Working under Thiersch’s direction in Paul’s studio, Mies designed in 1907 a pavilion for the Lawn Tennis Club in Berlin-Zehlendorf 022, an elegant essay on the archetypal primitive hut featuring a classical prostylus beneath a shallow hip roof, located at the edge of a wood. Not long afterwards, Thiersch recommended Mies to Behrens, whose studio he joined in the fall of 1908 021.

At the time Behrens was arguably the most important modernist of his generation in Germany: not only a gifted artist but also an influ-ential teacher and polemicist. Having moved to Berlin in 1907 to work with the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), Germany’s general electrical company, his studio quickly became the locus of the most progressive design in Germany and attracted talented young architects, including Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and Le Corbusier, who would soon (even sooner than Mies) emerge as key protagonists of an international modern movement.

Like Paul, Behrens had started his career in painting, graphic art and the decorative arts, but he had moved into architecture by 1901 with the design of his own house in the Darmstadt Artists Colony. The house demonstrated that Behrens could break with stylistic precedent and create a domestic environment as a total work of art capable of revital-izing the meaning of everyday life. The sinuous lines of the dining room

infused its walls, tables, chairs and chandeliers with animate energies, while the crystalline lines of the music room inscribed it with a radiance bursting from the surface of precious stones, rich woods, glass and mirrors in a gesture of transformation from within. Both vegetal and crystalline geometries served to symbolize purity and regeneration.

When Behrens moved to Düsseldorf in 1903 to direct its School of Applied Arts he abandoned Jugendstil, with its organic allusions, emphasis on uniqueness and craft, and elite patronage. Like others, he now sought a style that could be more readily generalized for the growing middle class and more easily modernized using machine-assisted modes of manufacturing. He turned to geometric construc-tions, patterns and modular systems, subsuming all scales of artefacts under the regulative laws of number, proportion and form.

Asked much later what he had learned from Behrens, Mies replied, ‘In one sentence, I could perhaps state that I have learned the great form.’3 But what exactly did this mean? The quest for the ‘great form’ – astylar and universal – had become a leitmotif for art at the turn of the century, promising to unify all modes of cultural expression. The desire for such a unity was fuelled, as we have seen, by the formal affinities that had united neoclassical art, architecture, furniture, in-teriors and urban design a century earlier, ‘around 1800’.4 With this precedent in mind, Behrens developed a crystalline version of neo-classicism, using a homogeneous geometry to create entire worlds of pure architectonics and pure spirit. Behrens directed the opening ceremony for the colony, a mystic ritual written by Georg Fuchs (1868–1949), set on the great stairs of Joseph Maria Olbrich’s central hall and choreographed to a poem by Richard Dehmel (1863–1920). As the chorus chanted, they were led down the stairs by an artist-prophet in a long, flowing gown carrying a shrouded sign – a great crystal. The crystal gave the catalytic mission of the Wohnreform movement its most rarefied and ambitious artistic formulation.5 Absolute form became the guarantor of truth and beauty and the basis of an architectural metaphysics.

020 Ludwig Mies, Bismarck Memorial project, Deutsches Dank (German Gratitude), Bingen, 1910

021 Ludwig Mies (third from right) at the studio of Peter Behrens in Neubabelsberg, ca. 1910; Walter Gropius is on the far left and Adolf Meyer is to his right

020 021

After World War I erupted in the summer of 1914, Mies was initially able to continue his practice with the Urbig House (1915–7). But in 1915 he was inducted into the army and served first in a railroad detail in Hanau, near Frankfurt, then as a clerk back in Berlin, and finally in the infantry in Romania. With the financial support of Ada’s parents, Mies and his wife were still able to live in reasonable comfort, although they no longer pursued the idea of building a house. Their first daugh-ter, Dorothea (who later took the name Georgia), had been born just months before war was declared, which precipitated their move to a larger (and apparently beautiful) apartment near the Potsdamer Bridge, on Am Karlsbad 24.1 After the birth of the couple’s second daughter, Waltraut (1917–1959), in June 1917, Ada and the children moved in with her parents, where they stayed until the war ended.

Mies returned from the Eastern Front in January 1919, during the Nov-ember Revolution, which followed the October ceasefire and the Allies’ demand that a civil government be installed. A period of near-chaos ensued when Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, leaving a power vacuum that rival parties jockeyed to fill. As the National Assembly convened in Weimar to draft a new constitution, soldiers (many of them wound-ed) flooded into the cities. Violence became rampant between factions on the extreme left and right and even within factions. Soldiers unac-customed to civilian life formed a paramilitary organization, the Frei-korps, and their efforts to put down communist uprisings were sanc-tioned by the centrist interim government. Another turning point was the murder, in 1919, of two leaders of the communist Spartacus League, Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), who played a role in declaring the new republic.

While initially embraced with enthusiasm, the war had been longer and more destructive than anyone had imagined. It became known as the Great War, the first ‘World War’ and the first war of modern technology – of airplanes, submarines, tanks and nerve gas. More than thirteen million people died, and almost sixty million were injured, with untold miles of devastation. Although the Versailles Treaty of

Glass Skyscraper:New Beginnings

Glass Skyscraper: New Beginnings 5958 Avant-garde: Art and Life

058 Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper project, Berlin, 1921–2; perspective from the north

058

Glass Skyscraper: New Beginnings 6160 Avant-garde: Art and Life

by the example of Suprematist and Constructivist artists participating in social reconstruction in post-revolutionary Russia, German expres-sionists and Cubists embarked on their own program to unite art and life. Architects came together with artists in new cultural organizations such as the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers Council for Art) and the more moderate Novembergrüppe (November Group), which sought to establish new systems of patronage, education and production along with a new artistic paradigm. They were inspired by the scope of what El Lissitzky (1890–1941) would call ‘world reconstruction’ through abstraction, which seemed commensurate as well with the De Stijl movement that had also emerged during the war, shielded by the political neutrality of the Netherlands.3

As radical artists from across Europe flowed into Berlin, Mies’s inter-actions with them intensified both socially and in relation to his work. In all likelihood he had already come in contact with various artists at Hellerau – not only classmates of Ada’s, such as Mary Wigman (1886–1973), but many who came to visit the remarkable school. In the mid-1920s, Ada would send their daughters for dance lessons with Wigman, who was rapidly becoming one of the foremost modern dancers. During the war, when Mies was stationed in Berlin, he became close friends with Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881–1919), spending long evenings together drinking and talking about philosophy. Suffering from severe depression, Lehmbruck fled wartime Berlin in late 1916 for Zurich, where he took his life in the spring of 1919, before Mies could see him again. For his Glass Room of 1927 and the Tugendhat House of 1928–30, Mies would later choose a Lehmbruck sculpture – a torso of a young woman that combined physical beauty with both spiritual repose and melancholy 133, 246.

The same artists who had been denied state support as Impression-ism flourished under Wilhelmian rule founded groups such as the Workers Council for Art as well as Novembergrüppe, which Mies joined in 1922. These groups laid out their programs in the spirit of earlier revolutions, focusing on rational first principles and linking artistic creativity to the ideals of life, freedom and social justice.4 Led initially by Bruno Taut, the Workers Council recognized architecture’s role in drawing the plastic arts together and towards social regenera-tion. When Walter Gropius took over, together with the critic Adolf Behne (1885–1948) as secretary, the effort was inflected towards artistic visions and utopias. Seeking to cut all ties with the past, the group coupled its political demands with dreams of a ‘New Man’, ‘New Society’ and ‘New Building’, which effectively radicalized themes familiar from the Jugendstil and Secessionist movements, as well as the pre-war youth and reform movements. Once again artists and architects assigned themselves leading roles for the comprehensive renewal of society. Whereas the process of cultural regeneration had been launched by small groups and rarefied opportunities before the war, it now broadened to the scale of reconstruction and the desire to address the working and middle classes.

One of the most comprehensive calls for new beginnings came, for example, not from an architect or artist but rather an industrialist, banker, intellectual and politician. Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) had been a cabinet minister during the war as well as director of the giant Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (German Electrical Company, AEG), founded by his father, Emil Rathenau (1838–1915), the patron of Peter Behrens. In a series of books, Walther set out a vigorous polemic for a new socialist republic: Die neue Wirtschaft (The New Economy, 1918), Der neue Staat (The New State, 1919), and Die neue Gesellschaft (The New Society, 1919). He assigned culture a central role for its capacity to provide a new image of society to which Ger-mans could adapt themselves.5 No longer was culture to be a servant of pre-existing social forms and conditions; instead it would be a productive force capable of generating a new world through educa-tion, new knowledge and directed innovation. Having helped found the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), Rathenau became its minister of reconstruction in 1921.

1919 forced the official end of the Wilhelmian Empire, the social sys-tem that underpinned it was slow to change. The parliamentary monarchy established when Germany was founded as a nation in 1871 had prepared few for the republican democracy now demanded by the Allies. Few too were prepared for the difficulties of economic recovery, which were exacerbated by high reparations, general strikes and, by 1923, crippling inflation, as well as foreign occupation of the industrial heartland, the Ruhr.

Neither the Allies nor the forces of the ensuing workers’ revolt suc-ceeded in fully displacing the coalition of Junkers, industrialists, army and state bureaucracy that had amalgamated social and political power under the Empire and led Germany’s rise as an industrial force. Extreme inflation alienated the middle class and weakened both the trade unions and the centrist Social Democratic Party (SDP), which were the Republic’s strongest advocates. As a result the authoritarian legacies that underpinned German industrialization continued well after the experiment in democracy began and, with it, the task of re-construction. Only in 1924, with the shift of political support from the extremist parties to the SDP and the increase in fiscal stabilization induced by the Dawes Plan, did the economic and political situation in Germany become sufficiently stable for renewed investment and mobilization of industry.

The expansion of the economy, the high level of public spending in the arts as well as housing, and the explosion of artistic innovation, popular culture and new media all contributed to the sense of a new historical formation, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of destruction and defeat. The rebuilding program would see the creation of fifteen thousand units of public housing in Frankfurt and another fourteen thousand in Berlin, along with housing, hospitals, schools, markets, public baths and stadia in cities across the country. The situation provided extraordinary opportunities – even imperatives – for archi-tects interested in industrialized methods of construction and the reorganization of labour from the traditional trades to factory produc-tion. It is small wonder that Americanization and Fordism enjoyed considerable popularity during this period, as did a corporatist model of class harmony through expanded productivity.

In the years immediately following the war, construction materials were scarce, and there were still few opportunities for architects. Yet ‘building’ and ‘construction’ quickly became watchwords, not only amongst the advocates of the new architecture but also those hoping to reconstruct society and its institutions from first principles, from the ground up. Four years of unprecedented devastation and loss of life had interrupted the continuity of history to such an extent that nothing, it seemed, could possibly be the same again; the past had literally become rubble. Paintings by Ludwig Meidner (1884–1966), such as Apocalypse and Revolution (both 1913) had expressed the sense prior to the war that cultural revitalization was contingent upon destroying the old. During the suspended and volatile state between war and peace of 1918 and 1919, many artists, writers and architects turned to images of rebirth and resurrection, phoenixes and utopias, to express their hope that the losses of the war would be recouped by the opportunity to begin anew. The woodcut The New Bird Phoe-nix (1919) by César Klein (1876–1954), the book Becoming (1921–2) by Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942) and the book Alpine Architektur (1919) 060 by Bruno Taut offered allegories for rebirth and new worlds, while posters by Max Pechstein (1881–1955) called artists to action, warning against the dangers of ‘strangling the young freedom’.2 During the war the art world had in fact remained active, with expressionist works experiencing even a commercial boom in 1917; now its formal innova-tions were placed in the service of a new-found activism that brought artists and architects together around shared political aims 059.

For the most part, the various reform movements and organizations of the Wilhelmian period picked up where they had left off. Amongst architects of the younger generation, however, social reform was now coupled with greater interest in artistic experimentation. Galvanized

059 Bruno Taut, illustration from Die Auflößung die Städte, 1920 060 Bruno Taut, illustration from Alpine Architektur, 1919

Barcelona Pavilion:SpiritualizingTechnology

Reporting on the German Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exposition in 1929, the critic Justus Bier (1899–1990) emphasized, ‘The task was an unusual one for today’ since the building lacked any function, ‘at least not an obvious or tangible function, not one that imposes itself on the building’.1 Its only ostensible function was to house receptions, most notably the opening ceremony, presided over by King Alfonso XIII (1886–1941) and Queen Eugenia Victoria (1887–1969) of Spain on May 28. Its deeper purpose, however, was to demonstrate the spirit of the Weimar Republic 183.2 As Georg von Schnitzler (1884–1962), commissioner general for the German con-tributions to the fair, put it, the pavilion was to be a space representing the new Germany, no longer fettered by old imperial and conservative ways but rather progressive, liberal and democratic. Unlike the pavil-ions of other countries, which housed displays of national achieve-ments, the German pavilion was free of exhibits (which were shown elsewhere) 196, leaving the building to focus exclusively on higher things.3 ‘We wished here to show,’ Schnitzler explained, ‘what we can do, what we are, how we feel today and see. We don’t want anything but clarity, simplicity, honesty.’4 This was the first time since World War I that Germany could present itself outside its own borders as an equal partner within the community of nations. The country seized the chance to promote trade but also, through Schnitzler’s insistence and personal financing, to demonstrate that its greatest achievement was its rebirth as an open, peaceful and spiritual nation, as evidenced in its architecture. Whereas architecture had been called upon to represent the nation previously, in earlier German pavilions, it now assumed a new centrality.5 The pavilion in Barcelona was, in Bier’s words, ‘A construction dedicated to representation, empty space, and consequently space-in-itself. Architecture as free art – expression of spiritual commitment (geistiger Verpflichtung).’6

Bier went on to note how fortunate it was that this task had landed in Mies’s hands. Eschewing the historical styles, closed forms and axial compositions of other pavilions at the show 182, Mies’s dynamic con-figuration of stone masses and elemental planes was contained but

also open to the exhibition grounds and encouraged free movement within 186. To some observers, including King Alfonso, the austere pavilion appeared unfinished, yet it was in fact constructed with a rich mixture of materials: some opaque, others transparent, some modern, others ancient, dull as the earth but also clear and sparkling with reflec-tions of light. Using travertine, two kinds of green marble, onyx, three colours of plate glass, steel columns, a red curtain, a black wool carpet and two pools of water – one light green, the other dark black – Mies demonstrated, as Bier observed, that the function of representation was possible without icons, decoration or ‘false pathos’. The pavilion sounded ‘a pure tone in the midst of helpless, romantically nostalgic exhibitions’ that otherwise filled the international fair.7

By 1924 Mies had already argued that modern architecture should go beyond the rational and economic fulfilment of functions to create architecture as art – a building-art capable of producing symbols of its time.8 The year after the Barcelona exhibition, he would write of the imminence of a new type of beauty aligned with a new reality, its requirements and technological means. It was the first time that Mies publicly linked beauty to the pursuit of truth through the words of Augustine, which he would repeat for the rest of his life: ‘Beauty is the radiance of truth.’9 Bier applauded the pavilion for marking a new beginning in architecture that, nonetheless, took up a tradition ‘to which it already belonged’.10 It achieved a great richness of spatial experience without losing any of its rigour. As if answering Schnitzler’s mandate, Bier noted that walking through the pavilion’s spaces produced ‘an extraordinary exchange of feelings’ and evoked an impression of spatial unity, notwithstanding its openness and appar-ent fragmentation. Even in its parts, ‘the whole speaks to the spirit of the observer as a spatial work of art constructed through fantasy’.11

With complete freedom of design, as one observer noted, Mies gave his pavilion ‘the peaceful form of a house’– a modern country house ennobled and abstracted into a monument, raised on a podium, dis-sociated from everyday life and emptied of any purpose other than

capturing the new spirit of the nation and the times 184–193.12 In effect it demonstrated an ability to address the challenges that Mies outlined in his lecture notes of 1927–8: to master technology and abstraction, raise consciousness and achieve a new infinity and a new freedom. Adapting the form of a house was evidence of the centrality of the new mode of domesticity for social and cultural renewal in Germany after 1900 and reinforced the cultural anthropology on which modern architecture based itself. ‘We can only talk of a new building art,’ Mies observed, ‘when [the battle (crossed out)] new life forms have been formed.’13 The pavilion’s central reception area resembles a living room; its covered patio recalls the covered dining areas that Mies often incorporated between house and garden. As a house it is larger than life; its functions have been obscured, its spaces emptied and its forms enlarged and mathematized into a pure architectonic configu-ration of space or, as Theo van Doesburg might have understood it, of space-time. The plan of the pavilion also resembles the abstract constructions of lines that Mies’s friend and colleague Werner Graeff had made in 1921, invested with animate energy and dynamic rhythm as his mentors van Doesburg and Hans Richter had advised 194. On the other hand, the pavilion may also be likened to a temple, standing behind an existing colonnade of classical columns that lined the edge of the site but were edited out of contemporary photographs 195.14 In Barcelona Mies specifically requested the site behind the colon-nade, where he constructed a version of his Brick Country House as a marble and glass refuge in which no one, in fact, would dwell. In so doing he turned a nascent model of domestic architecture into a temporary setting of complex ambiguities and unresolved tensions, which captivated the attention not only of contemporary visitors but also of generations afterwards who only knew the work through a few black-and-white photographs. Notwithstanding its short life, it became so powerful in the architectural imagination of the twentieth century that in 1986, fifty-seven years after its pieces had been disas-sembled and lost, it was meticulously reconstructed, enabling people to experience it once again in full colour and at full scale.15 That it was considerably larger than photographs had suggested and

138 Task: Mastering Modernity Barcelona Pavilion: Spiritualizing Technology 139

182 Aerial view of the central zone of the 1929 Barcelona Interna- tional Exposition; German Pavilion on the lower right

183 King Alfonso XIII and Mies van der Rohe at the opening of the Barcelona Pavilion, May 27, 1929

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184 Mies van der Rohe, German Pavilion (Barcelona Pavilion), International Exposition, Barcelona, 1928–9; plan

185 Barcelona Pavilion; sketch perspective of the principal facade

186 Barcelona Pavilion; view of principle facade and approach, with German flags

187 Barcelona Pavilion; view of main entrance with doors removed

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188 Barcelona Pavilion; interior view of the main area with the onyx wall in the foreground, the ‘living room’ with black carpet, red curtain and white chairs in the middle ground, and the small courtyard beyond the tinted glass wall behind

189 Barcelona Pavilion; interior view with onyx wall, black carpet, and stools and tables designed for the pavilion by Mies with Lilly Reich

190 Barcelona Pavilion; interior view featuring the onyx wall and sitting area, looking towards the small courtyard

191 Barcelona Pavilion; view along garden edge looking towards Georg Kolbe’s Dawn

192 Barcelona Pavilion; rear exit with temporary glass doors, photograph by Sasha Stone, 1929

193 (Overleaf) Barcelona Pavilion; small courtyard with Georg Kolbe’s Dawn

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189 190

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Barcelona Pavilion: Spiritualizing Technology 147146 Task: Mastering Modernity

richer in material variety and colour triggered a new appreciation of Mies’s handling of scale – not too big yet monumental – and colour – subtle yet vibrant, always integral to the materials rather than applied.

In his review Bier gave equal weight to the character of the pavilion as both a ‘thing-in-itself’ (he valued its architectonic rigour and clar-ity and a rich terrain for spatial and emotional experiences. The commissioner’s wife, Lilly von Schnitzler (1889–1981), reported it this way: ‘As if from a fairy tale, not of the Arabian Nights, but from an almost supernaturally inspired music of eternal space, not as a house, but as a drawing of lines in such a space by a hand that defines the human reach towards infinity.’16 As with the Glass Skyscraper, Mies used not only sketches – mostly by his assistant, Sergius Ruegenberg – but also a flexible model with a plasticine base to test alternative configurations, moving small panes of glass or cel-luloid around, together with strips of cardboard pasted over with coloured Japanese papers, to simulate alternative visual and spatial effects and psychological affects.

While Mies laughed at the fear of glass expressed by the sponsors of the pavilion, he also cautioned against using glass alone, being care-ful to combine it with other materials.17 Having played with its reflec-tive properties in the skyscrapers, explored translucencies and colours in the Glass Room, boasted of its ‘fairy tale effects’ for the S Adam Department Store,18 and envisioned its use in the urban kaleidoscope of his Alexanderplatz proposal, he now turned to a richer palette of materials. He even went so far as to use the oldest and most vener-ated material in Western architecture – marble – in combination with artificial industrial materials. This combination and the allusion to temples were consistent with Alois Riehl’s teaching that the new should be a rediscovery, revaluation or reiteration of the past. ‘The ancient Good – hold fast to it!’ he advised, ‘The new Good is but a transformation of the old.’1 9 Like the Glass Room, the German Pavilion should be included amongst Mies’s experimental projects exploring the potential of materials – old as well as new. In this context it might

aptly be called the Marble and Glass Pavilion, or even the Mixed-Materials Pavilion, if the lush fabrics and furnishings are also consid-ered: the red velvet curtain, black woollen carpet and white leather chairs and stools that were the fruits of another collaboration with Lilly Reich 197.20

In the literature there is a noticeable divergence of opinion about the meaning of the form and effects of the Barcelona Pavilion. Early admirers such as Philip Johnson (1906–2005) were content to merely describe it and laud the originality of its flowing space.21 Ludwig Hilberseimer echoed Johnson in commending its simplicity, ‘which was, as always, complexity itself’.22 Pursuing this complexity Hilber-seimer noted that in dividing the enclosed space, the vertical planes also ‘united it optically’ and orchestrated a succession of different spatial compartments. Alluding to its embodiment of the human psyche and its ability to mediate oppositions, he wrote,

The space seemed to be in motion, flowing from one part to an-other, merging with the enclosed water court and finally with the outside space. As the inside and the outside space united, so did the rational of the structure and the irrational of the space concept, resulting in a masterpiece of architecture, in a great work of art.23

Hilberseimer concluded that, like Piet Mondrian, Mies aimed ‘at the spiritual’.24

Closer to the present, more extensive interpretations of Mies’s dedi-cation to ‘spirit’ have been offered by Richard Padovan and Fritz Neumeyer, the former invoking the Augustinian tradition that informed the theological literature in the architect’s library, and the latter adding the filter of German idealism. Here I would like to focus on Neumeyer’s interpretation and reserve Padovan’s observations for a discussion of Mies’s later work in America, where the scholastic influence became more fully architectonic.

In the late 1980s, Neumeyer presented the Barcelona Pavilion in terms of a search for a higher order through a classical dialectic. He called

it ‘an ideal creating of space in which material and construction, mat-ter and idea are fused through poetic equivalence into a new higher harmony, which raised itself to the “realm of the spirit” (Walter Riezler) and appeared to announce a new “world image”’.25 Guided espe-cially by Mies’s reading of Romano Guardini, Neumeyer emphasized not synthesis but rather ‘bound dualities’ between life and form, inside and outside, unformed and over-formed, nothing and appearance, stasis and dynamics, duration and flux.26 He pointed out that such a dialectic is resonant with many of the other philosophers who Mies read, from Plato to Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Max Scheler and Nico-lai Hartmann (1882–1950). If for Guardini polarity was a ‘basic model of experience’, it was nevertheless also something to be overcome, or at least mediated. Thinking through life in its concreteness promised to unlock the ‘objective totality’ of reality, the omnipresence of the Divine, which remained inaccessible to the abstract theorizing that had become a dominant feature of modernity. Like Mies, Guardini underscored the centrality of life, life processes and practices, ‘for only in life are [the] opposites resolved’.27 ‘Our task,’ Mies highlighted in Guardini’s Gegensatz: Versuche zu einer Philosophie des Lebendig-Konkreten (Opposites: Attempt at a Philosophy of the Living-Concrete) of 1925, ‘is to progress further to a new, albeit critically proven unity.’28

As he made clear in his lecture notes of 1927–8, Mies saw binding or mediating dualities as a way of responding to the challenges and potentials of modernization. It was a way for humanity to take charge of the machine, its abstract rationality, domination of nature, frag-mentation and inhumanity, and to draw it into culture, which was invested with sacred qualities, albeit in secularized guise. In his Briefe vom Comer See (Letters from Lake Como) of 1927, Guardini diagnosed the ills of modernity in terms of the problems of life under the condi-tions of industrialization, scientific consciousness and mass society. He insisted that something could and must be done and outlined a program of liberal reform in which the new architecture played a role. Wanting to break the isolation of the Church from affairs of society and culture, Guardini suggested that by taking technology as task, a

new kind of Christian world could be created that would advance the history of spirit. With struggle, a new community and brotherhood too could be forged out of the masses, one that would stand under God, even if it did so unknowingly. He articulated his conception of the task at hand in words that Mies reiterated almost verbatim in his lecture of 1928 on the ‘Preconditions of Architectural Work’.29

Like Guardini, Mies insisted that it must be possible to reach a new order, a new stage in history and spirit, by passing through the fire of modernity. Given that he delivered his lecture while designing the German Pavilion, surely Neumeyer is justified in recognizing its im-plicit agenda in these thoughts. Certainly, it helps to explain what Mies meant when he later recalled, ‘For me, the time I spent working in Barcelona was a shining [luminous] moment in my life’.30 In America he would refer to his work as ‘battles of spirit’.31 For Neumeyer per-ambulating in the ordered realm of the new image that the pavilion offered would enable the individual to experience things symboli-cally once again. It would re-sensitize visitors to ‘experience freshly what is expressed in things – in nature, in words and in buildings – as “sacred signs”’ in which the mystery of God reveals itself in likeness.’32

‘In the hard and clear atmosphere of technology and consciousness, artistic and spiritual values could unfold’ once more.33 ‘In Barcelona,’ Neumeyer concluded in a Neo-Platonic vein, ‘Mies made experience-able by artistic means that metaphysical space that resides behind all empirical space, so that men who crossed this frame would feel the possibilities of a hidden life, both in themselves and in their epoch.’34

In 1973, well after Mies’s death, the Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) launched an alternative line of interpret-ing Mies when he described the pavilion’s fragmentation and unre-solved dualities as an example of pure negative dialectics in architec-ture. Looking to German philosophers of Mies’s own generation but with whom Mies remained largely unfamiliar – most notably those associated with the Frankfurt School who had pioneered Marxist critical theory of culture under capitalism – Tafuri gave his earlier in-

194

195

194 Werner Graeff, Constructivist drawing, 1921

195 Barcelona Pavilion under construction, showing the finishing of the base and the existing row of classical columns in front

Designed and built between 1941 and 1943, the Minerals and Metals Research Building was the first of Mies’s projects to be realized on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). It gained much notoriety for registering the steel frame of its interior machine hall on the side elevation in a pattern that many observers likened to a paint-ing by Piet Mondrian 371, 373. Alison and Peter Smithson recognized something more than linear composition, however, when they called this outward diagram of inner structure the beginnings of Mies’s ‘poetry of “assembled” components’, for which he would become so well known.1 Using I-beams and H-beams for both skeleton and en-closure gave him an expression of structure not unlike the German Fachwerk vernacular of medieval houses and warehouses. In the mid-1920s Raoul H Francé and Werner Lindner had considered these as exemplars for modern industrial buildings.2 Mies continued to develop this direction, first with the Library and Administration Build-ing and Student Union (both of 1944, both unrealized), and then in his first built realizations of a ‘general solution to new problems’ with the Navy Building (Alumni Memorial Hall, 1945–6) and the Metallurgical and Chemical Engineering Building (1946–7).

With advertisements in professional journals declaring ‘America Lives by Steel’ and articles praising the material’s many virtues and applica-tions, it is small wonder that Mies’s early experience in America rein-forced his conviction that ‘as long as we have this same economic and scientific structure, steel will be the essence of our cities’.3 Having already employed steel framing in his European buildings, Mies now made its expression central, embracing more directly the rationalist tradition represented, for instance, by Ludwig Hilberseimer’s entry to the Chicago Tribune Building (1922) and Max Taut’s Office for the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (General Federation of German Trade Unions) in Berlin (1922–3). Mies’s Verseidage Silk Fac-tory in Krefeld (1934–5) had already moved in this direction, articulat-ing the structural bay in the exterior horizontal glazing and masonry spandrels, although not exposing either the steel or the masonry.

IIT: Clear Construction

IIT: Clear Construction 259258 Organic Architecture

370

370 Mies van der Rohe, Library and Administration Building, IIT, 1944–5; perspective of exterior corner

371 (Overleaf) Mies van der Rohe, Minerals and Metals Research Building, IIT, 1941–3; exterior view

260 Organic Architecture IIT: Clear Construction 261

371

282 Unfolding Structure

Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span

Robert Venturi (b 1925), one of Mies’s most famous critics, recognized the transformative dynamic of Mies’s work in an essay of 1978 in which he compared it to a McDonald’s restaurant 399.1 Long interested in the flows and exchanges between high and low art, Venturi turned to Mies ‘to remind ourselves that Modern architecture went to the industrial vernacular for inspiration and for its forms’. For Venturi, ‘a “factory” by Mies is vernacular art enhanced as fine art, while a McDonald’s on the Strip is folk art derived from fine art’.2 The ‘Golden Arches’, he noted, were appropriated from high examples of modern architecture such as the Palace of the Soviets project for Moscow (1930) by Le Corbusier 400 or, closer to home, the St Louis Arch (1947–8, 1959–64) by Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), both of which in turn were based on the new industrial vernacular of engineering works such as Eugène Freysinnet’s concrete airship hangars at Orly (1916). Venturi characterized Mies’s ‘almost classical orders’ as an ‘artful contortion’ of ‘the exposed steel I-beams of a certain kind of American factory’ applied ‘almost as pilasters, to symbolize industrial process and pure order and yet to conform to acceptable standards of fire protection for non industrial buildings’.3

Notwithstanding Venturi’s insight, neither ‘enhancement’ nor ‘contor-tion’ are sufficient terms to describe Mies’s work in relation to the vernacular. As we have seen before, he took up – perhaps one could say appropriated – the emerging structural types of his time such as the high-rise skyscraper and transformed them through elemental clarification into prismatic technical forms emptied of everything ex-traneous, purified and subtly recast as art. This process, which was intended to make manifest the immanent geometries and proportions of the building, employed a pallet of rich materials (woods, marbles and glass) and enriched surfaces (painted steel, polished stone). In similar fashion, Mies took up the long-span industrial shed and trans-formed it over the course of several projects into what he called a ‘clear construction’: the Concert Hall project of 1941–2, the Cantor Drive-In Restaurant of 1945–50, and Crown Hall of 1950–6. These constructions were not only integral or autonomous in themselves but also self-

reflexive. By making manifest and legible the inner logic of his con-structions – their geometric, mathematical and technical logic – Mies sought to bring technology to completion as art; or, to speak once more in the language of Karl Bötticher, to bring technical form to completion as art form. For Mies, such art forms were hallmarks of the organic. He believed that when the great form of an historical epoch finally came into visibility, it signalled the completion of an epoch and, in a Janus-like gesture, the opening of the next. This was the deeper meaning of Mies’s statement that clear construction was the precon-dition for the variable ground plan. It was, he implied, only with the variable ground plan that new life forms could actualize themselves and usher in an architecture not yet envisioned in the present.

Mies’s approach to developing, refining and expressing structural-spatial types that were generated first in the industrial vernacular – elevating bauen into Baukunst – was indebted to histories of archi-tecture that emphasized the dependence of historical styles upon the systems of enclosure characteristic of their age. From Bötticher to Alois Riegl to Sigfried Giedion (each of whom Mies read), the ar-chitecture of earlier epochs was defined in terms of its unique, fully integrated system of construction – that is, in terms of its manner of roof covering and enclosure, which arose from the material and spiritual conditions of its time and became formalized in a particular structural-spatial type. Writing in the 1840s, Bötticher, for instance, suggested that the essence of a style was given through the system that articulated the covering of space into parts or structural units. The Hellenic style was based on a post-and-lintel system of construc-tion, executed first in wood and then in stone, requiring massive elements, short spans and restricted floor plans, whereas the ba-silicas and baths of ancient Rome were based on a system of curved masonry vaults. By contrast, the Gothic style employed the pointed arch, allowing masonry structures to escape their limitations and produce wide spans, extraordinary heights and unprecedented transparency. Bötticher maintained that, just as these styles had done in their own times, any new style would have to harness the potential

of the newest building material: in the late nineteenth century, that meant iron, a synthetic material not found in nature.4

For many proponents of modern architecture, technical forms and constructive systems were a function of evolutionary selection, devel-opment and dissemination. Le Corbusier, for instance, suggested that only through a process of evolution were the forms of objects and buildings perfected to a standard that could then be replicated through mass production, as was taking place in automobile production 401. Giedion pointed to the insertion of an iron frame by Henri Labrouste (1801–1875) into the Library of Ste-Geneviève in Paris of 1842–50 as the first instance in which columns stood freely in a space without visible beams. Le Corbusier later systematized the use of such free-standing columns in concrete, with his Domino houses of 1914–15. His Citrohan House (1922) series and purist villas of the 1920s demon-strated the Domino’s potential not only for plastic expression within a free plan but also, as Giedion argued, for a new, generic architecture with which to rebuild entire cities. Mies’s own efforts, in his work of the late 1920s through his early projects for IIT, sought to develop a comparable system in steel, rather than concrete; first with columns, and then with expressed frames.

Like Bötticher, Giedion mined the history of architecture to plot the trajectory of its typological development. According to him, the curtain wall attained its true form beginning with the late-nineteenth century exhibition buildings and ending with the studio wing of the Bauhaus in Dessau of 1926. He similarly tracked the development of clear-span structures, starting with the use of iron in the roof trusses of late eigh-teenth century theatres such as the Theatre Français of 1766 by Victor Louis (1731–1800). He showed how the iron roof became exposed and glazed with the Galerie d’Orlean at the Palais Royale of 1829–31 by Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) 415. The structure be-came lighter as engineers learned to exploit the tensile strength of iron, as in the entrance hall of the Gare de Nord of 1862 by Jean-Barthélémy Camille Polonceau (1813–1859), and was extended to the

Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span 283

398 Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, 1945–51; view from the north

398

284 Unfolding Structure Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span 285

ground with the Rue Madeleine Market Hall of 1824 by Marie-Gabriel Veugny (1785–1856) and later in Les Halles of 1853 by Victor Baltard (1805–1874). Focusing on these Parisian examples, Giedion did not here include the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park of 1851 by Joseph Paxton (1803–1865), but he gave it due place in other writings.5 The tendency towards a complete constructive system in iron and glass continued with larger and more publicly significant structures devel-oped in the mid-to late nineteenth century, such as train stations, de-partment stores and exhibition buildings. The Galerie des Machines in Paris of 1878 by Henri de Dion (1828–1878) was the first to carry all the forces of the system into the foundations without tie rods. This linear development culminated in the enormous Galerie des Machines of 1887–9 by Charles Louis Ferdinand Dutert (1845–1910) 416. Encom-passing a space 115 metres by 420 metres (380 feet by 1,380 feet) and 45 metres (150 feet) high, Giedion called this limitless space ‘an un-precedented conquest of matter’.6

An earlier historian, Alfred Gotthold Meyer (1920–1998), also alluded to a technological sublime when he maintained that structures like the Galerie des Machines, Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower (1889) intro-duced not only a new scale but also a new atmospheric spatiality and a new steely beauty.7 Phyllis Lambert noted that an enlarged copy of the famous photograph of the Galerie des Machines was found in the Mies Collection of the University Archives of IIT, mounted on board with grommet holes, which suggests it was used for teaching.8 She describes this as ‘an indication of the powerful alliance of space and structure in [Mies’s] mind’9 and a possible inspiration for the Foundry Hall of his Minerals and Metals Building of 1941–3 and Concert Hall project. If the Minerals and Metals Building was Mies’s first effort to express structure in America, it was also his first clear-span building. He had been exposed to this type while working for Peter Behrens on the AEG Turbine Factory back in 1909–10 417. His article on ‘industrial construction’ of 1924 was illustrated with a contemporary industrial shed by Behrens of 1910 as well as a barn by Hugo Häring of 1924–5 that used modern laminated wood.10

While working on the Minerals and Metals Building, Mies undertook two hypothetical projects that explored different formal and spatial paradigms for programs requiring large floor areas: the Museum for a Small City (1940–3) and the Concert Hall. The museum was an ex-pansive, single-storey horizontal space: a column grid, as at the German Pavilion at the Brussels Exposition (1934–5), contained within a rect-angular precinct that in turn contained garden courtyards as well as figural rooms. 404, 405 It was a conceptual project that grew out of George Danforth’s student thesis at IIT (1940–3) and was developed for a special issue of Architectural Forum on ‘New Buildings of 194X’, published in May 1943 402. The accompanying text describes the desire to erase the ‘barrier between the art work and the living com-munity [through a] garden approach for the display of sculpture’ and its interior equivalent, the open plan, which provided unprecedented spatial freedom. The text emphasized that the building was a single large area, which allowed for ‘every flexibility in use’11 – something now achievable with the modern structural type of the steel frame. Flexibility would become the raison d’etre and hallmark of Mies’s pursuit of universal space. Notwithstanding the elegance of this system, Mies also developed his interest in the long-span industrial shed as an alternative spatial model. His museum incorporated a fragment of such a structure, for the roof of the auditorium, where two steel beams running above the roof plane support the shaped acoustic ceiling within 403. Mies turned directly to the long-span structure, however, in designing the Concert Hall.

In coming to America, Mies must have been struck by the prevalence of long-span light-weight steel structures. He must have recognized in the discourse on economy, speed and flexibility so many of the ideas that he himself had helped promote in the early 1920s. Already a popular form of industrial construction prior to America’s entry into World War I, the long-span shed with its the uninterrupted floor area became the standard for manufacturing airplanes for the war effort. Savings in material and labour were appreciated, as were the virtues of welding. Articles in architectural journals treated the design of

factories as more than pragmatic problems: they represented archi-tectural and aesthetic opportunities. ‘America Lives by Steel’, declared one advertisement for the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company of Ohio in the February 1938 issue of Progressive Architecture. Another ad, for the Bethlehem Steel Company, in the March 1940 issue of Architectural Record, as well as full-length articles in these and other publications emphasized the freedom and flexibility in use afforded by long-span, open-web steel joists for garages, airplane hangers and manufacturing plants.

As he often did with new ideas, Mies began to explore the clear-span pavilion through his teaching at IIT. In 1942 he suggested to a student, Paul Campagna (1917–2010), that he find a photograph of a very large space, perhaps an industrial structure, and then transform it into a concert hall for 3,000 people by hanging acoustic partitions. Campagna worked with an interior image of the Glenn L Martin Air-craft Assembly Building in Middle River, Baltimore, Maryland. Built around 1938 by Albert Kahn (1869–1942), the structure had appeared in journals as well as George Nelson’s 1939 monograph on the archi-tect, which Mies owned 406.12 Mies suggested Campagna enlarge the image of the building to 1 metre (3 feet) and use the technique of col-lage, cutting and pasting paper to create acoustic partitions and thus making a room within the otherwise undivided interior space.13 The result was later repeated with minor variations by other students and collaborators and held the germ of all the clear-span pavilions that Mies would go on to design, from the Cantor Drive-In project to Crown Hall, the Mannheim Theatre project (1952–3), Bacardi Building project (1957–61), Chicago Federal Centre (1959–64), Toronto-Dominion Cen-tre (1963–9) and New National Gallery in Berlin (1962–8). Mies’s own version of the photocollage 407, more than 1.5 metres (5 feet) long, placed a grey plane on the floor to mark the audience area, hung a white acoustic plane above it and wrapped it with a combination of straight and curved free-standing walls in yellow, brown and black. In the foreground Mies placed a sculpture of a seated figure by Aristide Maillol (1861–1944), which was later replaced with one of an Egyptian

scribe.14 Comparing this collage of the Concert Hall with his subsequent long-span pavilions brings into focus the techniques that he used to transform the shed from ‘a given’ into a work of Baukunst.

In his design for a drive-in restaurant located on a commercial strip in Indianapolis, Indiana (1945–8), Mies brought the structural trusses to the exterior of the clear-span building 410. Having earlier probed the possibility of external structure – in the IIT Student Union project and then again in the Museum for a Small City – Mies now made it the central idea for the project commissioned by Joseph Cantor, a suc-cessful businessman, theatre proprietor, film distributor and art col-lector. As hundreds of drawings in the Mies Archive attest, he laboured over the design, which was never realized. Cantor had initially ap-proached Mies to design a bowling alley and also commissioned a house design from him, which remained unbuilt, of which there are also many drawings 411–414.15 The roof of the Cantor Drive-In is a thin plane hung from the bottom of two long trusses and concealing its own structure within, even though that structure is integral to the stability of the trusses above it. The roof plane forms the ceiling of the interior at the same time as it extends beyond the glass box to create sheltering overhangs, which he would develop in later projects 408. Walls of varied heights demarcate different areas within the res-taurant: low and intermediate walls for seating areas, and full-height walls for portions of the kitchen. The chairs Mies imagined were his own MR10 cantilevered chairs, designed in 1927.

Giedion once called the Eiffel Tower a body without flesh. Mies’s proj-ect recalls images of skeletal structures such as those that populated the scientific literature in his library. The drama of the gesture was accentuated by running the two 46.3 metre (152 foot) trusses longitu-dinally rather than across the shorter span, which would have been more conventional and economical. As a result, the trusses are he-roic in scale and support a large neon sign to produce a Constructivist image that would have been striking from the highway 409. Cantor had called for a strong identity from the road. Moreover, the trusses

401

399 First McDonald’s, Des Plaines, Illinois, 1955

400 Le Corbusier, Palace of the Soviets Project, Moscow, 1930

401 Le Corbusier, the evolution of the car from 1900–1921; as published in L’Esprit Nouveau, 1921

402 Museum for a Small City; as presented in ‘Museum: Mies van der Rohe, Architect, Chicago, Ill’, Architectural Forum, May 1943

399

400

402


403 Mies van der Rohe, Museum for a Small City, no site, 1940–3; sketch elevation and section showing exoskeletal truss on the roof and hanging acoustic shell

404 Museum for a Small City; plan

405 Museum for a Small City; photocollage

406 Albert Kahn, Glenn L Martin Aircraft Assembly Building, Baltimore, Maryland, 1937–9; interior view of the 90 metre (300 foot) clear span trusses

407 Mies van der Rohe, Concert Hall Project, 1941–2; photocollage

404

405 407

403

406


428


431

432

429

430

429 Farnsworth House; view from porch looking into living area

430 Farnsworth House; entry area with dining table

431 Farnsworth House; living room

432 Farnsworth House; sleeping area with wardrobe


adapted to reveal the unitary great hall with an unprecedented degree of transparency. As built, Crown Hall deviated from the rest of the campus more substantially, introducing a 3 metre (10 foot) building module, all glass enclosure, and long-span structural bay of 18 metres by 37 metres (60 feet by 120 feet) 435–437, 442. Its exceptional status within the campus is not merely a testimony to the importance that Mies might have assigned his school; rather it speaks to a fundamentally different approach to the education of architecture. It was built without classrooms and hence the need to conform to the 7.3 metre (24 foot) campus grid, which had been predicated on classrooms. There were also no lecture halls or faculty offices. Instead, Crown Hall offers ‘one big room’, as Mies put it, 37 metres by 67 metres (120 feet by 220 feet) by 5.5 metres (18 feet) high, surrounded by glass walls that were trans-lucent for the lower 2.7 metres (9 feet) to shield the calm interior from outside activity while letting the sky provide a gently changing tableau through the upper ribbon of clear glass. A multipurpose area occupies the centre of the building, flanked on either side by open studios usu-ally populated with rows of drafting tables. Just beyond the free-standing walls of this central space, stairs lead to the lower level, which housed the Institute for Design and now houses offices, workshops, the library and other support facilities 444. The life of the school is supported with minimal subdivision in order to maximize flexibility but also shared experiences – to see and be seen. Open to the main entrance, the multipurpose space is also open to the studios on either side and is typically used for lectures, exhibitions and other gatherings 445. Peter Carter, who worked with Mies in the later period, pointed out that within the single hall students at different levels were aware of all stages of the curriculum and could participate fully within it.

In an interview of 1958, Mies explained that the variable ground plan depended on what he called ‘clear construction’. ‘The variable ground plan and a clear construction cannot be viewed separately,’ he said. ‘Clear construction is the basis for a free ground plan.’23 Elsewhere he called Crown Hall the ‘clearest construction we have achieved’.24 But why exactly was clarity so important? And what did it take to achieve

it? Unfortunately, Mies himself never provided a direct answer; nor can his design practices be distilled into a single, simple or clear re-sponse. Certainly we could say that the expression of structure was an important ingredient of clear construction. At Crown Hall that meant placing the structure on the outside of the building – rather than on the inside – running plate girders above the roof and supporting them on H-section columns integrated into the perimeter envelop. Using a clear-span structure was surely also important for achieving a free ground plan, although a clear construction could be attained with other structural types as well, such as the high-rise skeleton and the low-rise repeated frame. Judging from the buildings, clear construc-tion requires that an uncompromised, integrated and unified form be achieved, one that reveals itself not only as abstract geometry but also in its dependence upon a material system of construction. A clear construction implies the articulation of every element of a construction type or system, both in itself (as an individuated and separated ele-ment) and in its relationship to other elements (as part of a larger whole). Sharp outlines, smooth surfaces, precise lines, elemental geometry, harmonic proportions and reveal joints all contribute to produce not only the fact of clear construction but its appearance as well. It was in this sense that those who taught with Mies saw the di-dactic value of Crown Hall. ‘What other school,’ remarked Goldsmith, ‘has a building where the students work in a building that is an embodi-ment of the ideas that are being taught.’25

Instead of the open trusses of the Cantor Drive-In, here Mies used plate girders 1.9 metres (6 feet 3 inches) deep, the surfaces of which have an elemental geometry of flanges and webs similar to the H-section columns, thereby enabling a single language of structure to be devel-oped for using only horizontal and vertical planes 439. Joseph Fujikawa (1922–2003), who worked on the project, recalled that it may have been the exigency of making a quick model with solid strips of cardboard for the trusses that inspired Mies to use plate girders.26 These supre-matist bents appear less heroic than those of the Cantor Drive-In and run across the shorter dimension of the building. There are none at

the ends of the building, accentuating the impression that the glass box is held within the structural armature and cantilevered beyond it 443. Instead of the five structural bays of the original scheme, there are only three larger bays, each of which is subdivided into six minor bays containing windows. These minor bays are formed with H-section columns welded to the horizontal beams of the roof and the continuous C-channel around the perimeter of the concrete floor; they protrude from the outer surface to create shadow and profile, just as do the I-beams on the curtain wall 438, 440. In the lower section of the win-dows, these bays are further divided into two. A broad platform hov-ers outside the main entrance midway up the stairs as at the Farnsworth House. Inside, an acoustic ceiling is hung tight to the underside of the roof structure and fills the box to the perimeter glass wall, where it is revealed as a hovering plane. Lighting strips and ventilators are crisply integrated flush with the acoustic panels. The floor is terrazzo with white and dark grey stones. Stairs are open holes to the level below, their railings reduced to tiny steel sections so that they almost disappear. Two ventilation shafts and utility chases run from floor to ceiling; they are finished in white plaster so as to be distinct from the language of structure and thereby avoid being mistaken as supportive piers. The oak panelled walls of the multipurpose space create a recep-tion/office area facing the north entrance and storage closets.

Invited around 1952 to participate in a competition for a new building for the National Theatre in Mannheim, Germany, Mies produced another version of the long-span pavilion, this time confronting a need for more functionally determined rooms.27 The program sought to combine opera and theatre on two stages. As Mies observed, this required spaces of two types: stages and workshops with large column-free areas and small rooms for many different purposes. He accom-modated the former in an upper storey 12 metres (40 feet) in height, while the latter were organized in a lower level 4 metres (13 feet) in height. Overall the building is 80 metres by 160 metres (260 feet by 525 feet), with structural bays of 24 metres by 80 metres (80 feet by 260 feet) and a building module of 4 metres (13 feet) 447, 448, 450. Mies had

concluded that ‘the best way to enclose this complicated spatial organ-ism was to cover it with a huge column-free hall of steel and coloured glass or, to express it differently, to place this whole theatre organism inside such a hall.’28 To create the effect of a single large interior, all the enclosed rooms on the main level are located in the centre of the plan. Visitors stroll in a 12 metre (40 foot)-high ambulatory around this core, viewing the panorama outside at the same time as the internal opera-tions of the theatre. This was a result of the fact that, as Mies explained, ‘In the Mannheim building, stage and auditorium are independent of the steel construction. The large auditorium juts out from its concrete base much like a hand from the wrist.’29 The two theatres – one at either end – are open to view from the ambulatory and even from the outside 451. With the main floor lifted above the ground, resting on low walls of green marble that extend beyond the building, the main auditorium itself becomes a stage visible from outside. The exoskeleton once again features open trusses, which are 8 metres (26 feet) deep and run across the short dimension of the building. The fly tower protrudes above the roof as a small prismatic block and is barely visible from the ground. Earlier sketches and a collage for a theatre of 1947 show a more exuberantly shaped auditorium ceiling, transforming the hung plane of the earlier Concert Hall into a graceful arc 446, 449. The diagonal rake of the seating cantilevers boldly up in the opposite direction as a counterpoint. While curtains can be used to screen the interior, the spirit of the building is open, public, visible, even theatrical, albeit within a recessive architecture. When the client extended the competition into a second stage, Mies declined to participate further.

All of the projects discussed in this chapter employ similar techniques for articulating individual elements and their relationships, concealing as well as registering the inherent forces of their structure. The form of the elements and the constructive logic of the buildings as a whole are accentuated through the display of modularity, geometric abstrac-tion, reduction, simplification of surfaces, sharpening of outlines and unifying harmonic proportions, as well as transparency and external-ized structure. It was through these techniques of separating and

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434

433 Farnsworth House; view of living space with curtains half drawn

434 Farnsworth House; view of detail at porch with window intersecting floor

426 Unfolding Structure Lafayette Park: City Landscape 427

621 Mies van der Rohe, One Charles Center, Baltimore, Maryland, 1960–3; ground floor plan

622 Mies van der Rohe, IBM Office Building, Chicago, 1966–70; site and ground floor plan

623 One Charles Center

624 IBM Office Building

625 Mies van der Rohe, Chicago Federal Center, Chicago, 1959–64; site and ground floor plan

626 Chicago Federal Center

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623

622 625

624 626


627 Mies van der Rohe, Westmount Square, Montreal, 1965–8; plaza

628 Westmount Square; site plan of the plaza level

629 Mies van der Rohe, Colonnade Apartments, Newark, New Jersey, 1958–60

630 Colonnade Apartments; site plan630

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631 Mies van der Rohe, Battery Park Apartment Development, New York, 1957–8; aerial photograph of downtown New York with Battery Park lower left

632 Battery Park Apartment Development; site plan

633 Mies van der Rohe, Highfield House Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland, 1963–5

634 Highfield House Apartments; site plan

631 633

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635 Mies van der Rohe with Philip Bobrow, Nun’s Island Apart-ments, Montreal, 1967–9; model of ensemble, 1968

636 Nun’s Island Apartments; first apartment tower

637 Mies van der Rohe, Nun’s Island Esso Gas Station, Montreal, 1967–9; site plan

638 Nun’s Island Esso Gas Station; gas pumps

639 Nun’s Island Esso Gas Station; view north from street

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640 Mies van der Rohe, Toronto-Dominion Centre, Toronto, 1963–9; site plan

641 Toronto-Dominion Centre; south tower ground floor plan

642 Toronto-Dominion Centre; view of south plaza

643 Toronto-Dominion Centre; south tower typical floor plan

644 Toronto-Dominion Centre; aerial view under construction

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642 644

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Documents

Critical Realism: Life and Form Avant-garde: Art and Life