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 : New Beginnings 82 Good Forms for New Types 92 Esters and Lange Houses: New Language 114 Weissenhofsiedlung: Urban Montage

Task: Mastering Modernity 138 : 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 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 : 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 007 Ludwig Mies, Riehl House, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg, 1906–7; entrance from the upper walled garden

008 Ludwig Mies at the Riehl house, ca.1912

008

007

In 1906 Bruno Paul recommended Mies to the philosopher Alois Riehl Whereas the neighbouring villas were built as Italian or German Re- became the locus for an alternative way of life. Critical of placing Riehl House: Country and his wife, Sophie, who were looking to build a quiet house for naissance icons set within miniature picturesque gardens, the Riehl houses as features in the centre of their lots and treating the garden summers, weekends and their imminent retirement in the fashionable House was designed by Mies as a simple neo-Biedermeier block as a residual fragment of a picturesque landscape, Muthesius argued Berlin suburb of Potsdam-Neubabelsberg 008. Riehl was a celebrat- adapted to the local vernacular. Its rectangular mass of light ochre that gardens should be designed to be lived in. They should be open- House Critical Realism ed professor of philosophy at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in stucco was surmounted by a steeply peaked gable roof with eyebrow air equivalents to living rooms that could be used for dining, bathing Berlin, and the Riehls became Mies’s first patrons. Although the dormers 007, 010–012. Devoid of superfluous ornament, the house and even sleeping 016. The Riehl House was included in the second reasons for the clients’ trust in this relatively untested young man was defined by the tautness and geometric clarity of its volumes and edition of Muthesius’s book Landhaus und Garten (Country House remain unclear, Mies was sufficiently confident in his experience to the robust detailing of its balconies, windows and doors. Ornament and Garden) in 1910.3 take up the challenge. Like the architect, the Riehls were clearly aware was reserved for the centre of the entrance front, which features an of the reform movements then influencing the design of housing and elegant stucco interlace of wreaths. On the interior bright simple The functional reciprocity between inside and outside was to be the applied arts, but they eschewed the idea of marrying art and life rooms were well proportioned; constructed of modest yet durable matched formally by subsuming both building and garden within an – an idea that had underpinned Jugendstil’s efforts to increase the materials, they were well built yet spare. For all its studied modesty overarching architectural unity 009. The garden reform movement sensuous pleasure of everyday experience. They also eschewed the and simplicity, however, the house is remarkably subtle and complex. promoted an ‘architectonic’ garden, which featured axial planning, pursuit of a total work of art. Rather, the couple took a more ascetic geometric planting and lattice trellises that made the garden more approach, similar to the sober and practical Arts and Crafts movement Rotated on the site and pushed to one side, the building does not face architectural. At the same time, natural species, sturdy perennials and in England. They embraced the idea of the country house as a build- the street directly but rather recedes to make room for a formal ivy were reintroduced into common use to display nature’s wildness ing type directed at achieving a healthy and calm way of life, lived on flower garden, which serves as a space of reception and orientation. against the foil of mathematical form. This kind of garden was devel- the land. The house was to provide not only an antidote to the con- As a result the path leading from the street to the house first offers a oped in Germany by Paul Schultze-Naumburg (1869–1949) as well as gested and insalubrious metropolis but also an alternative to the panoramic view of the landscape beyond. The level plane on which Muthesius and in Austria by Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867–1908) and typical suburban villa: it was to provide a place in which life and both house and garden sit was created by terracing the site, which Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956). conversation could freely unfold. slopes dramatically down towards the picturesque Lake Griebnitz and the extensive landscape park of Potsdam. While the long axis of the Writing just after the turn of the century, Muthesius recognized that The Riehls’ relationship with Mies went much further than is typical formal garden links the street with the distant view, the cross axis the country house was still too expensive to be available to anyone of the client-architect relationship, for they treated him as a son. They leads, on the left, to the entrance of the house and, on the right, to the but the elite. Its dissemination would come in time but was contingent nurtured his personal intellectual development, sent him on a study stairway and lower gardens. on the reform of land tenure, the end of land speculation, improve- trip to Italy and introduced him to intellectual society in Berlin. Through ments to transportation (especially the railway), and the integration them Mies also developed a close friendship with Alois Riehl’s pro- The site’s design exemplified the planning principles promoted for of industrialized methods of house construction. Given the opportu- tégé Eduard Spranger, whom the couple also considered an adopted country houses by Hermann Muthesius, who had studied the emer- nity to organize a model housing estate for the German Werkbund in son.1 The house, completed in 1907, proved to be a remarkably ac- gence of the type in England and its suitability for Germany 015. 1927 – the famous Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart – Mies initially complished debut for a twenty year old from the provinces, who lacked Muthesius characterized metropolitan life in terms of hotel living, envisioned an entire fabric of country houses with integrated gardens higher education and had barely two years in Berlin. Dependent on congestion, disorder and alienation from the land. In contrast, the for middle-class families. existing conventions, it was nevertheless an ingenious transformation country house offered landownership, clean air, quiet and a calm of precedents and contained many ideas that Mies would develop in setting for personal and family life. He favoured spending evenings Although scholars and critics have paid little attention to Mies’s gar- new directions later. The house was immediately published and rec- at home playing the piano over attending concerts as more educa- dens – some even edited them out of photographs and drawings – ognized by critics.2 tional and character building. For the bourgeoisie the country house Barry Bergdoll recently showed how profoundly important they were

20 Critical Realism: Life and Form Riehl House: Country House Critical Realism 21 009 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 009 010 012

013 014

011

22 Critical Realism: Life and Form Riehl House: Country House Critical Realism 23 020 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

Seeking to expand his practice beyond furniture and interiors to include infused its walls, tables, chairs and chandeliers with animate energies, By 1905 the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935) would recognize Bismarck Memorial: entire buildings, Bruno Paul hired the architect Paul Thiersch (1879– while the crystalline lines of the music room inscribed it with a radiance that Behrens had launched a new Renaissance with his designs for 1928) to manage his studio in 1907.1 Thiersch came from a family of bursting from the surface of precious stones, rich woods, glass and the ‘Garden and Art Exhibition’ in Düsseldorf (1904), the ‘Northwest Munich architects and had been working in Düsseldorf for Peter mirrors in a gesture of transformation from within. Both vegetal and German Art Exhibition’ at Oldenburg (1904–5) 023, 024 and the read- Form and Space Behrens, whose new classicism had greatly impressed him.2 Like crystalline geometries served to symbolize purity and regeneration. ing room of the Düsseldorf City Library (1904). This was not, he said, Behrens, Wilhelm Kreis (1873–1955), Fritz Schumacher (1869–1947) a literal reprise of the Italian Renaissance, nor an evocation of Rome, and other young architects, Thiersch longed for a strong monumen- When Behrens moved to Düsseldorf in 1903 to direct its School of but the expression of a more universal classicism – rational, elemen- tal architecture that would be in tune with the rhythm of the times yet Applied Arts he abandoned Jugendstil, with its organic allusions, tal, Sachlich (objective).6 Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) suggested that would fulfil a desire for antiquity’s feeling for life, reuniting spirit, soul emphasis on uniqueness and craft, and elite patronage. Like others, art developed historically by alternating between linear or geometric and body in a way that had thus far eluded modern efforts. Thiersch’s he now sought a style that could be more readily generalized for the styles such as the Renaissance, with its closed, clear, individuated but own later work favoured the expression of powerful masses with growing middle class and more easily modernized using machine- lifeless forms, and painterly styles such as the Baroque, with its open, smooth uninterrupted surfaces regulated by harmonic proportions. assisted modes of manufacturing. He turned to geometric construc- ambiguous, melded-together and enlivened forms.7 The Viennese Working under Thiersch’s direction in Paul’s studio, Mies designed in tions, patterns and modular systems, subsuming all scales of artefacts historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905) concluded similarly that new styles 1907 a pavilion for the Lawn Tennis Club in Berlin-Zehlendorf 022, an under the regulative laws of number, proportion and form. typically begin with a geometric phase.8 Behrens focused on the elegant essay on the archetypal primitive hut featuring a classical logic of composition, which could be seen to underpin not only prostylus beneath a shallow hip roof, located at the edge of a wood. Asked much later what he had learned from Behrens, Mies replied, the Vitruvian tradition but also the Gothic and Egyptian. He developed Not long afterwards, Thiersch recommended Mies to Behrens, whose ‘In one sentence, I could perhaps state that I have learned the great an astylar geometry that sought to be at once radically modern and studio he joined in the fall of 1908 021. form.’3 But what exactly did this mean? The quest for the ‘great form’ radically archaic, sophisticated and primitive, timeless and timely. – astylar and universal – had become a leitmotif for art at the turn of Extending his new paradigm beyond the domestic realm, his exhibi- At the time Behrens was arguably the most important modernist of the century, promising to unify all modes of cultural expression. The tion grounds were even more ambitious in their projections of an his generation in Germany: not only a gifted artist but also an influ- desire for such a unity was fuelled, as we have seen, by the formal artistic totality, effectively transforming the crystal from a symbolic ential teacher and polemicist. Having moved to Berlin in 1907 to work affinities that had united neoclassical art, architecture, furniture, in- figure into a stereometric medium, still charged with transformative with the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), Germany’s teriors and urban design a century earlier, ‘around 1800’.4 With this and transcendental powers. The forms and dimensions of site works, general electrical company, his studio quickly became the locus of precedent in mind, Behrens developed a crystalline version of neo- buildings, furniture, pergolas, benches, lamps and even plantings the most progressive design in Germany and attracted talented young classicism, using a homogeneous geometry to create entire worlds were assimilated into a single formal system – a remarkable demon- architects, including Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and Le Corbusier, of pure architectonics and pure spirit. Behrens directed the opening stration that the principles of the architectonic garden could be placed who would soon (even sooner than Mies) emerge as key protagonists ceremony for the colony, a mystic ritual written by Georg Fuchs in the service of a transcendental artistic totality. of an international modern movement. (1868–1949), set on the great of Joseph Maria Olbrich’s central hall and choreographed to a poem by Richard Dehmel (1863–1920). Behrens’s system employed modularity and proportion, continuities Like Paul, Behrens had started his career in painting, graphic art and As the chorus chanted, they were led down the stairs by an artist- across scales and materials, and sharp outlines of individuated geo- the decorative arts, but he had moved into architecture by 1901 with prophet in a long, flowing gown carrying a shrouded sign – a great metric forms and elements; all techniques that Mies would later use. the design of his own house in the Darmstadt Artists Colony. The house crystal. The crystal gave the catalytic mission of the Wohnreform Solid and heavy, Behrens’s elemental masses were rendered with demonstrated that Behrens could break with stylistic precedent and movement its most rarefied and ambitious artistic formulation.5 such extreme tautness that they became schematic and paradoxi- create a domestic environment as a total work of art capable of revital- Absolute form became the guarantor of truth and beauty and the cally thin, even light. Through abstraction they became materially izing the meaning of everyday life. The sinuous lines of the basis of an architectural metaphysics. ambiguous, ethereal and otherworldly. Stone-like in form but not in

32 Critical Realism: Life and Form Bismarck Memorial: Form and Space 33 Glass Skyscraper: New Beginnings

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, 058 Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper project, with untold miles of devastation. Although the Versailles Treaty of Berlin, 1921–2; perspective from the north 058

58 Avant-garde: Art and Life Glass Skyscraper: New Beginnings 59 1919 forced the official end of the Wilhelmian Empire, the social sys- by the example of Suprematist and Constructivist artists participating tem that underpinned it was slow to change. The parliamentary in social reconstruction in post-revolutionary Russia, German expres- monarchy established when Germany was founded as a nation in sionists and Cubists embarked on their own program to unite art and 1871 had prepared few for the republican democracy now demanded life. Architects came together with artists in new cultural organizations by the Allies. Few too were prepared for the difficulties of economic such as the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers Council for Art) and the recovery, which were exacerbated by high reparations, general strikes more moderate Novembergrüppe (November Group), which sought and, by 1923, crippling inflation, as well as foreign occupation of the to establish new systems of patronage, education and production industrial heartland, the Ruhr. along with a new artistic paradigm. They were inspired by the scope of what El Lissitzky (1890–1941) would call ‘world reconstruction’ Neither the Allies nor the forces of the ensuing workers’ revolt suc- through abstraction, which seemed commensurate as well with the ceeded in fully displacing the coalition of Junkers, industrialists, army De Stijl movement that had also emerged during the war, shielded by and state bureaucracy that had amalgamated social and political the political neutrality of the Netherlands.3 power under the Empire and led Germany’s rise as an industrial force. Extreme inflation alienated the middle class and weakened both the As radical artists from across Europe flowed into Berlin, Mies’s inter- trade unions and the centrist Social Democratic Party (SDP), which actions with them intensified both socially and in relation to his work. were the Republic’s strongest advocates. As a result the authoritarian In all likelihood he had already come in contact with various artists at legacies that underpinned German industrialization continued well Hellerau – not only classmates of Ada’s, such as Mary Wigman after the experiment in democracy began and, with it, the task of re- (1886–1973), but many who came to visit the remarkable school. In construction. Only in 1924, with the shift of political support from the the mid-1920s, Ada would send their daughters for dance lessons with extremist parties to the SDP and the increase in fiscal stabilization Wigman, who was rapidly becoming one of the foremost modern induced by the Dawes Plan, did the economic and political situation dancers. During the war, when Mies was stationed in Berlin, he became in Germany become sufficiently stable for renewed investment and close friends with Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881–1919), spending long mobilization of industry. evenings together drinking and talking about philosophy. Suffering from severe depression, Lehmbruck fled wartime Berlin in late 1916 The expansion of the economy, the high level of public spending in for Zurich, where he took his life in the spring of 1919, before Mies the arts as well as housing, and the explosion of artistic innovation, could see him again. For his Glass Room of 1927 and the Tugendhat popular culture and new media all contributed to the sense of a new House of 1928–30, Mies would later choose a Lehmbruck sculpture historical formation, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of destruction – a torso of a young woman that combined physical beauty with both and defeat. The rebuilding program would see the creation of fifteen spiritual repose and melancholy 133, 246. thousand units of public housing in Frankfurt and another fourteen thousand in Berlin, along with housing, hospitals, schools, markets, The same artists who had been denied state support as Impression- public baths and stadia in cities across the country. The situation ism flourished under Wilhelmian rule founded groups such as the provided extraordinary opportunities – even imperatives – for archi- Workers Council for Art as well as Novembergrüppe, which Mies tects interested in industrialized methods of construction and the joined in 1922. These groups laid out their programs in the spirit of reorganization of labour from the traditional trades to factory produc- 059 Bruno Taut, illustration from Die Auflößung die Städte, 1920 060 Bruno Taut, illustration from Alpine Architektur, 1919 earlier revolutions, focusing on rational first principles and linking tion. It is small wonder that Americanization and Fordism enjoyed artistic creativity to the ideals of life, freedom and social justice.4 Led considerable popularity during this period, as did a corporatist initially by Bruno Taut, the Workers Council recognized architecture’s model of class harmony through expanded productivity. role in drawing the plastic arts together and towards social regenera- tion. When Walter Gropius took over, together with the critic Adolf In the years immediately following the war, construction materials Behne (1885–1948) as secretary, the effort was inflected towards were scarce, and there were still few opportunities for architects. Yet artistic visions and utopias. Seeking to cut all ties with the past, the ‘building’ and ‘construction’ quickly became watchwords, not only group coupled its political demands with dreams of a ‘New Man’, amongst the advocates of the new architecture but also those hoping ‘New Society’ and ‘New Building’, which effectively radicalized themes to reconstruct society and its institutions from first principles, from familiar from the Jugendstil and Secessionist movements, as well as the ground up. Four years of unprecedented devastation and loss of the pre-war youth and reform movements. Once again artists and life had interrupted the continuity of history to such an extent that architects assigned themselves leading roles for the comprehensive nothing, it seemed, could possibly be the same again; the past had renewal of society. Whereas the process of cultural regeneration had literally become rubble. Paintings by Ludwig Meidner (1884–1966), been launched by small groups and rarefied opportunities before the such as Apocalypse and Revolution (both 1913) had expressed the war, it now broadened to the scale of reconstruction and the desire sense prior to the war that cultural revitalization was contingent upon to address the working and middle classes. destroying the old. During the suspended and volatile state between war and peace of 1918 and 1919, many artists, writers and architects One of the most comprehensive calls for new beginnings came, for turned to images of rebirth and resurrection, phoenixes and utopias, example, not from an architect or artist but rather an industrialist, to express their hope that the losses of the war would be recouped banker, intellectual and politician. Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) had by the opportunity to begin anew. The woodcut The New Bird Phoe- been a cabinet minister during the war as well as director of the giant nix (1919) by César Klein (1876–1954), the book Becoming (1921–2) by Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (German Electrical Company, Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942) and the book Alpine Architektur (1919) AEG), founded by his father, Emil Rathenau (1838–1915), the patron 060 by Bruno Taut offered allegories for rebirth and new worlds, while of Peter Behrens. In a series of books, Walther set out a vigorous posters by Max Pechstein (1881–1955) called artists to action, warning polemic for a new socialist republic: Die neue Wirtschaft (The New against the dangers of ‘strangling the young freedom’.2 During the Economy, 1918), Der neue Staat (The New State, 1919), and Die neue war the art world had in fact remained active, with expressionist works Gesellschaft (The New Society, 1919). He assigned culture a central experiencing even a commercial boom in 1917; now its formal innova- role for its capacity to provide a new image of society to which Ger- tions were placed in the service of a new-found activism that brought mans could adapt themselves.5 No longer was culture to be a servant artists and architects together around shared political aims 059. of pre-existing social forms and conditions; instead it would be a productive force capable of generating a new world through educa- For the most part, the various reform movements and organizations tion, new knowledge and directed innovation. Having helped found of the Wilhelmian period picked up where they had left off. Amongst the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), Rathenau became its architects of the younger generation, however, social reform was now minister of reconstruction in 1921. coupled with greater interest in artistic experimentation. Galvanized

60 Avant-garde: Art and Life Glass Skyscraper: New Beginnings 61 182 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

182 183

Reporting on the German Pavilion at the Barcelona International also open to the exhibition grounds and encouraged free movement capturing the new spirit of the nation and the times 184–193.12 In effect Barcelona Pavilion: Exposition in 1929, the critic Justus Bier (1899–1990) emphasized, within 186. To some observers, including King Alfonso, the austere it demonstrated an ability to address the challenges that Mies outlined ‘The task was an unusual one for today’ since the building lacked any pavilion appeared unfinished, yet it was in fact constructed with a rich in his lecture notes of 1927–8: to master technology and abstraction, function, ‘at least not an obvious or tangible function, not one that mixture of materials: some opaque, others transparent, some modern, raise consciousness and achieve a new infinity and a new freedom. Spiritualizing imposes itself on the building’.1 Its only ostensible function was to others ancient, dull as the earth but also clear and sparkling with reflec- Adapting the form of a house was evidence of the centrality of the house receptions, most notably the opening ceremony, presided tions of light. Using travertine, two kinds of green marble, onyx, three new mode of domesticity for social and cultural renewal in Germany over by King Alfonso XIII (1886–1941) and Queen Eugenia Victoria colours of plate glass, steel columns, a red curtain, a black wool carpet after 1900 and reinforced the cultural anthropology on which modern Technology (1887–1969) of Spain on May 28. Its deeper purpose, however, was to and two pools of water – one light green, the other dark black – Mies architecture based itself. ‘We can only talk of a new building art,’ Mies demonstrate the spirit of the Weimar Republic 183.2 As Georg von demonstrated, as Bier observed, that the function of representation observed, ‘when [the battle (crossed out)] new life forms have been Schnitzler (1884–1962), commissioner general for the German con- was possible without icons, decoration or ‘false pathos’. The pavilion formed.’13 The pavilion’s central reception area resembles a ; tributions to the fair, put it, the pavilion was to be a space representing sounded ‘a pure tone in the midst of helpless, romantically nostalgic its covered patio recalls the covered dining areas that Mies often the new Germany, no longer fettered by old imperial and conservative exhibitions’ that otherwise filled the international fair.7 incorporated between house and garden. As a house it is larger than ways but rather progressive, liberal and democratic. Unlike the pavil- life; its functions have been obscured, its spaces emptied and its ions of other countries, which housed displays of national achieve- By 1924 Mies had already argued that modern architecture should go forms enlarged and mathematized into a pure architectonic configu- ments, the German pavilion was free of exhibits (which were shown beyond the rational and economic fulfilment of functions to create ration of space or, as Theo van Doesburg might have understood it, elsewhere) 196, leaving the building to focus exclusively on higher architecture as art – a building-art capable of producing symbols of of space-time. The plan of the pavilion also resembles the abstract things.3 ‘We wished here to show,’ Schnitzler explained, ‘what we can its time.8 The year after the Barcelona exhibition, he would write of constructions of lines that Mies’s friend and colleague Werner Graeff do, what we are, how we feel today and see. We don’t want anything the imminence of a new type of beauty aligned with a new reality, its had made in 1921, invested with animate energy and dynamic rhythm but clarity, simplicity, honesty.’4 This was the first time since World requirements and technological means. It was the first time that Mies as his mentors van Doesburg and Hans Richter had advised 194. On War I that Germany could present itself outside its own borders as an publicly linked beauty to the pursuit of truth through the words of the other hand, the pavilion may also be likened to a temple, standing equal partner within the community of nations. The country seized Augustine, which he would repeat for the rest of his life: ‘Beauty is behind an existing colonnade of classical columns that lined the edge the chance to promote trade but also, through Schnitzler’s insistence the radiance of truth.’9 Bier applauded the pavilion for marking a new of the site but were edited out of contemporary photographs 195.14 and personal financing, to demonstrate that its greatest achievement beginning in architecture that, nonetheless, took up a tradition ‘to In Barcelona Mies specifically requested the site behind the colon- was its rebirth as an open, peaceful and spiritual nation, as evidenced which it already belonged’.10 It achieved a great richness of spatial nade, where he constructed a version of his Brick Country House as in its architecture. Whereas architecture had been called upon to experience without losing any of its rigour. As if answering Schnitzler’s a marble and glass refuge in which no one, in fact, would dwell. In represent the nation previously, in earlier German pavilions, it now mandate, Bier noted that walking through the pavilion’s spaces so doing he turned a nascent model of domestic architecture into a assumed a new centrality.5 The pavilion in Barcelona was, in Bier’s produced ‘an extraordinary exchange of feelings’ and evoked an temporary setting of complex ambiguities and unresolved tensions, words, ‘A construction dedicated to representation, empty space, and impression of spatial unity, notwithstanding its openness and appar- which captivated the attention not only of contemporary visitors but consequently space-in-itself. Architecture as free art – expression of ent fragmentation. Even in its parts, ‘the whole speaks to the spirit of also of generations afterwards who only knew the work through a spiritual commitment (geistiger Verpflichtung).’6 the observer as a spatial work of art constructed through fantasy’.11 few black-and-white photographs. Notwithstanding its short life, it became so powerful in the architectural imagination of the twentieth Bier went on to note how fortunate it was that this task had landed in With complete freedom of design, as one observer noted, Mies gave century that in 1986, fifty-seven years after its pieces had been disas- Mies’s hands. Eschewing the historical styles, closed forms and axial his pavilion ‘the peaceful form of a house’– a modern country house sembled and lost, it was meticulously reconstructed, enabling compositions of other pavilions at the show 182, Mies’s dynamic con- ennobled and abstracted into a monument, raised on a podium, dis- people to experience it once again in full colour and at full scale.15 figuration of stone masses and elemental planes was contained but sociated from everyday life and emptied of any purpose other than That it was considerably larger than photographs had suggested and

138 Task: Mastering Modernity Barcelona Pavilion: Spiritualizing Technology 139 184 186

185 184 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 187

140 Task: Mastering Modernity Barcelona Pavilion: Spiritualizing Technology 141 188 191

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

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 189 190 192

142 Task: Mastering Modernity Barcelona Pavilion: Spiritualizing Technology 143 193

144 Task: Mastering Modernity Barcelona Pavilion: Spiritualizing Technology 145 194 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

195

194 richer in material variety and colour triggered a new appreciation of aptly be called the Marble and Glass Pavilion, or even the Mixed- it ‘an ideal creating of space in which material and construction, mat- new kind of Christian world could be created that would advance the Mies’s handling of scale – not too big yet monumental – and colour Materials Pavilion, if the lush fabrics and furnishings are also consid- ter and idea are fused through poetic equivalence into a new higher history of spirit. With struggle, a new community and brotherhood – subtle yet vibrant, always integral to the materials rather than applied. ered: the red velvet curtain, black woollen carpet and white leather harmony, which raised itself to the “realm of the spirit” (Walter Riezler) too could be forged out of the masses, one that would stand under chairs and stools that were the fruits of another collaboration with and appeared to announce a new “world image”’.25 Guided espe- God, even if it did so unknowingly. He articulated his conception of In his review Bier gave equal weight to the character of the pavilion Lilly Reich 197.20 cially by Mies’s reading of Romano Guardini, Neumeyer emphasized the task at hand in words that Mies reiterated almost verbatim in his as both a ‘thing-in-itself’ (he valued its architectonic rigour and clar- not synthesis but rather ‘bound dualities’ between life and form, inside lecture of 1928 on the ‘Preconditions of Architectural Work’.29 ity and a rich terrain for spatial and emotional experiences. The In the literature there is a noticeable divergence of opinion about the and outside, unformed and over-formed, nothing and appearance, commissioner’s wife, Lilly von Schnitzler (1889–1981), reported it meaning of the form and effects of the Barcelona Pavilion. Early stasis and dynamics, duration and flux.26 He pointed out that such a Like Guardini, Mies insisted that it must be possible to reach a new this way: ‘As if from a fairy tale, not of the Arabian Nights, but from admirers such as Philip Johnson (1906–2005) were content to merely dialectic is resonant with many of the other philosophers who Mies order, a new stage in history and spirit, by passing through the fire of an almost supernaturally inspired music of eternal space, not as a describe it and laud the originality of its flowing space.21 Ludwig read, from Plato to Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Max Scheler and Nico- modernity. Given that he delivered his lecture while designing the house, but as a drawing of lines in such a space by a hand that defines Hilberseimer echoed Johnson in commending its simplicity, ‘which lai Hartmann (1882–1950). If for Guardini polarity was a ‘basic model German Pavilion, surely Neumeyer is justified in recognizing its im- the human reach towards infinity.’16 As with the Glass Skyscraper, was, as always, complexity itself’.22 Pursuing this complexity Hilber- of experience’, it was nevertheless also something to be overcome, plicit agenda in these thoughts. Certainly, it helps to explain what Mies Mies used not only sketches – mostly by his assistant, Sergius seimer noted that in dividing the enclosed space, the vertical planes or at least mediated. Thinking through life in its concreteness promised meant when he later recalled, ‘For me, the time I spent working in Ruegenberg – but also a flexible model with a plasticine base to also ‘united it optically’ and orchestrated a succession of different to unlock the ‘objective totality’ of reality, the omnipresence of the Barcelona was a shining [luminous] moment in my life’.30 In America test alternative configurations, moving small panes of glass or cel- spatial compartments. Alluding to its embodiment of the human Divine, which remained inaccessible to the abstract theorizing that he would refer to his work as ‘battles of spirit’.31 For Neumeyer per- luloid around, together with strips of cardboard pasted over with psyche and its ability to mediate oppositions, he wrote, had become a dominant feature of modernity. Like Mies, Guardini ambulating in the ordered realm of the new image that the pavilion coloured Japanese papers, to simulate alternative visual and spatial The space seemed to be in motion, flowing from one part to an- underscored the centrality of life, life processes and practices, ‘for offered would enable the individual to experience things symboli- effects and psychological affects. other, merging with the enclosed water court and finally with the only in life are [the] opposites resolved’.27 ‘Our task,’ Mies highlighted cally once again. It would re-sensitize visitors to ‘experience freshly outside space. As the inside and the outside space united, so did in Guardini’s Gegensatz: Versuche zu einer Philosophie des Lebendig- what is expressed in things – in nature, in words and in buildings – as While Mies laughed at the fear of glass expressed by the sponsors of the rational of the structure and the irrational of the space concept, Konkreten (Opposites: Attempt at a Philosophy of the Living-Concrete) “sacred signs”’ in which the mystery of God reveals itself in likeness.’32 the pavilion, he also cautioned against using glass alone, being care- resulting in a masterpiece of architecture, in a great work of art.23 of 1925, ‘is to progress further to a new, albeit critically proven unity.’28 ‘In the hard and clear atmosphere of technology and consciousness, ful to combine it with other materials.17 Having played with its reflec- Hilberseimer concluded that, like Piet Mondrian, Mies aimed ‘at the artistic and spiritual values could unfold’ once more.33 ‘In Barcelona,’ tive properties in the , explored translucencies and colours spiritual’. 24 As he made clear in his lecture notes of 1927–8, Mies saw binding or Neumeyer concluded in a Neo-Platonic vein, ‘Mies made experience- in the Glass Room, boasted of its ‘fairy tale effects’ for the S Adam mediating dualities as a way of responding to the challenges and able by artistic means that metaphysical space that resides behind Department Store,18 and envisioned its use in the urban kaleidoscope Closer to the present, more extensive interpretations of Mies’s dedi- potentials of modernization. It was a way for humanity to take charge all empirical space, so that men who crossed this frame would feel of his Alexanderplatz proposal, he now turned to a richer palette of cation to ‘spirit’ have been offered by Richard Padovan and Fritz of the machine, its abstract rationality, domination of nature, frag- the possibilities of a hidden life, both in themselves and in their epoch.’34 materials. He even went so far as to use the oldest and most vener- Neumeyer, the former invoking the Augustinian tradition that informed mentation and inhumanity, and to draw it into culture, which was ated material in Western architecture – marble – in combination with the theological literature in the architect’s library, and the latter invested with sacred qualities, albeit in secularized guise. In his Briefe In 1973, well after Mies’s death, the Italian architectural historian artificial industrial materials. This combination and the allusion to adding the filter of German idealism. Here I would like to focus on vom Comer See (Letters from Lake Como) of 1927, Guardini diagnosed Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) launched an alternative line of interpret- temples were consistent with Alois Riehl’s teaching that the new Neumeyer’s interpretation and reserve Padovan’s observations for the ills of modernity in terms of the problems of life under the condi- ing Mies when he described the pavilion’s fragmentation and unre- should be a rediscovery, revaluation or reiteration of the past. ‘The a discussion of Mies’s later work in America, where the scholastic tions of industrialization, scientific consciousness and mass society. solved dualities as an example of pure negative dialectics in architec- ancient Good – hold fast to it!’ he advised, ‘The new Good is but a influence became more fully architectonic. He insisted that something could and must be done and outlined a ture. Looking to German philosophers of Mies’s own generation but transformation of the old.’1 9 Like the Glass Room, the German Pavilion program of liberal reform in which the new architecture played a role. with whom Mies remained largely unfamiliar – most notably those should be included amongst Mies’s experimental projects exploring In the late 1980s, Neumeyer presented the Barcelona Pavilion in terms Wanting to break the isolation of the Church from affairs of society associated with the Frankfurt School who had pioneered Marxist the potential of materials – old as well as new. In this context it might of a search for a higher order through a classical dialectic. He called and culture, Guardini suggested that by taking technology as task, a critical theory of culture under capitalism – Tafuri gave his earlier in-

146 Task: Mastering Modernity Barcelona Pavilion: Spiritualizing Technology 147 IIT: Clear Construction

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 for the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (General Federation of 370 Mies van der Rohe, Library and Administration Building, IIT, German Trade Unions) in Berlin (1922–3). Mies’s Verseidage Silk Fac- 1944–5; perspective of exterior corner tory in Krefeld (1934–5) had already moved in this direction, articulat- ing the structural bay in the exterior horizontal glazing and masonry 371 (Overleaf) Mies van der Rohe, Minerals and Metals Research spandrels, although not exposing either the steel or the masonry. Building, IIT, 1941–3; exterior view 370

258 Organic Architecture IIT: Clear Construction 259 371

260 Organic Architecture IIT: Clear Construction 261 398 Mies van der Rohe, , Plano, Illinois, 1945–51; view from the north

398

Robert Venturi (b 1925), one of Mies’s most famous critics, recognized reflexive. By making manifest and legible the inner logic of his con- of the newest building material: in the late nineteenth century, that Farnsworth to Crown the transformative dynamic of Mies’s work in an essay of 1978 in which structions – their geometric, mathematical and technical logic – Mies meant iron, a synthetic material not found in nature.4 he compared it to a McDonald’s restaurant 399.1 Long interested in sought to bring technology to completion as art; or, to speak once the flows and exchanges between high and low art, Venturi turned more in the language of Karl Bötticher, to bring technical form to For many proponents of modern architecture, technical forms and Hall: Clear Span to Mies ‘to remind ourselves that Modern architecture went to the completion as art form. For Mies, such art forms were hallmarks of the constructive systems were a function of evolutionary selection, devel- industrial vernacular for inspiration and for its forms’. For Venturi, organic. He believed that when the great form of an historical epoch opment and dissemination. Le Corbusier, for instance, suggested that ‘a “factory” by Mies is vernacular art enhanced as fine art, while a finally came into visibility, it signalled the completion of an epoch and, only through a process of evolution were the forms of objects and McDonald’s on the Strip is folk art derived from fine art’.2 The ‘Golden in a Janus-like gesture, the opening of the next. This was the deeper buildings perfected to a standard that could then be replicated through Arches’, he noted, were appropriated from high examples of modern meaning of Mies’s statement that clear construction was the precon- mass production, as was taking place in automobile production 401. architecture such as the Palace of the Soviets project for Moscow dition for the variable ground plan. It was, he implied, only with the Giedion pointed to the insertion of an iron frame by Henri Labrouste (1930) by Le Corbusier 400 or, closer to home, the St Louis Arch variable ground plan that new life forms could actualize themselves (1801–1875) into the Library of Ste-Geneviève in Paris of 1842–50 as (1947–8, 1959–64) by Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), both of which in turn and usher in an architecture not yet envisioned in the present. the first instance in which columns stood freely in a space without were based on the new industrial vernacular of engineering works visible beams. Le Corbusier later systematized the use of such free- such as Eugène Freysinnet’s concrete airship hangars at Orly (1916). Mies’s approach to developing, refining and expressing structural- standing columns in concrete, with his Domino houses of 1914–15. His Venturi characterized Mies’s ‘almost classical orders’ as an ‘artful spatial types that were generated first in the industrial vernacular – Citrohan House (1922) series and purist villas of the 1920s demon- contortion’ of ‘the exposed steel I-beams of a certain kind of American elevating bauen into Baukunst – was indebted to histories of archi- strated the Domino’s potential not only for plastic expression within a factory’ applied ‘almost as pilasters, to symbolize industrial process tecture that emphasized the dependence of historical styles upon free plan but also, as Giedion argued, for a new, generic architecture and pure order and yet to conform to acceptable standards of fire the systems of enclosure characteristic of their age. From Bötticher with which to rebuild entire cities. Mies’s own efforts, in his work of protection for non industrial buildings’.3 to Alois Riegl to Sigfried Giedion (each of whom Mies read), the ar- the late 1920s through his early projects for IIT, sought to develop a chitecture of earlier epochs was defined in terms of its unique, fully comparable system in steel, rather than concrete; first with columns, Notwithstanding Venturi’s insight, neither ‘enhancement’ nor ‘contor- integrated system of construction – that is, in terms of its manner of and then with expressed frames. tion’ are sufficient terms to describe Mies’s work in relation to the roof covering and enclosure, which arose from the material and vernacular. As we have seen before, he took up – perhaps one could spiritual conditions of its time and became formalized in a particular Like Bötticher, Giedion mined the history of architecture to plot the say appropriated – the emerging structural types of his time such as structural-spatial type. Writing in the 1840s, Bötticher, for instance, trajectory of its typological development. According to him, the curtain the high-rise skyscraper and transformed them through elemental suggested that the essence of a style was given through the system wall attained its true form beginning with the late-nineteenth century clarification into prismatic technical forms emptied of everything ex- that articulated the covering of space into parts or structural units. exhibition buildings and ending with the studio wing of the Bauhaus traneous, purified and subtly recast as art. This process, which was The Hellenic style was based on a post-and-lintel system of construc- in Dessau of 1926. He similarly tracked the development of clear-span intended to make manifest the immanent geometries and proportions tion, executed first in wood and then in stone, requiring massive structures, starting with the use of iron in the roof trusses of late eigh- of the building, employed a pallet of rich materials (woods, marbles elements, short spans and restricted floor plans, whereas the ba- teenth century theatres such as the Theatre Français of 1766 by Victor and glass) and enriched surfaces (painted steel, polished stone). In silicas and baths of ancient Rome were based on a system of curved Louis (1731–1800). He showed how the iron roof became exposed and similar fashion, Mies took up the long-span industrial shed and trans- masonry vaults. By contrast, the Gothic style employed the pointed glazed with the Galerie d’Orlean at the Palais Royale of 1829–31 by formed it over the course of several projects into what he called a ‘clear arch, allowing masonry structures to escape their limitations and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) 415. The structure be- construction’: the Concert Hall project of 1941–2, the Cantor Drive-In produce wide spans, extraordinary heights and unprecedented came lighter as engineers learned to exploit the tensile strength of Restaurant of 1945–50, and Crown Hall of 1950–6. These constructions transparency. Bötticher maintained that, just as these styles had done iron, as in the entrance hall of the Gare de Nord of 1862 by Jean- were not only integral or autonomous in themselves but also self- in their own times, any new style would have to harness the potential Barthélémy Camille Polonceau (1813–1859), and was extended to the

282 Unfolding Structure Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span 283 399 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

399 402

401

400 ground with the Rue Madeleine Market Hall of 1824 by Marie-Gabriel While working on the Minerals and Metals Building, Mies undertook factories as more than pragmatic problems: they represented archi- scribe.14 Comparing this collage of the Concert Hall with his subsequent Veugny (1785–1856) and later in Les Halles of 1853 by Victor Baltard two hypothetical projects that explored different formal and spatial tectural and aesthetic opportunities. ‘America Lives by Steel’, declared long-span pavilions brings into focus the techniques that he used to (1805–1874). Focusing on these Parisian examples, Giedion did not paradigms for programs requiring large floor areas: the Museum for one advertisement for the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company of transform the shed from ‘a given’ into a work of Baukunst. here include the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park of 1851 by Joseph a Small City (1940–3) and the Concert Hall. The museum was an ex- Ohio in the February 1938 issue of Progressive Architecture. Another Paxton (1803–1865), but he gave it due place in other writings.5 The pansive, single-storey horizontal space: a column grid, as at the German ad, for the Bethlehem Steel Company, in the March 1940 issue of In his design for a drive-in restaurant located on a commercial strip in tendency towards a complete constructive system in iron and glass Pavilion at the Brussels Exposition (1934–5), contained within a rect- Architectural Record, as well as full-length articles in these and other Indianapolis, Indiana (1945–8), Mies brought the structural trusses to continued with larger and more publicly significant structures devel- angular precinct that in turn contained garden courtyards as well as publications emphasized the freedom and flexibility in use afforded the exterior of the clear-span building 410. Having earlier probed the oped in the mid-to late nineteenth century, such as train stations, de- figural rooms. 404, 405 It was a conceptual project that grew out of by long-span, open-web steel joists for garages, airplane hangers and possibility of external structure – in the IIT Student Union project and partment stores and exhibition buildings. The Galerie des Machines George Danforth’s student thesis at IIT (1940–3) and was developed manufacturing plants. then again in the Museum for a Small City – Mies now made it the in Paris of 1878 by Henri de Dion (1828–1878) was the first to carry all for a special issue of Architectural Forum on ‘New Buildings of 194X’, central idea for the project commissioned by Joseph Cantor, a suc- the forces of the system into the foundations without tie rods. This published in May 1943 402. The accompanying text describes the As he often did with new ideas, Mies began to explore the clear-span cessful businessman, theatre proprietor, film distributor and art col- linear development culminated in the enormous Galerie des Machines desire to erase the ‘barrier between the art work and the living com- pavilion through his teaching at IIT. In 1942 he suggested to a stu- lector. As hundreds of drawings in the Mies Archive attest, he laboured of 1887–9 by Charles Louis Ferdinand Dutert (1845–1910) 416. Encom- munity [through a] garden approach for the display of sculpture’ and dent, Paul Campagna (1917–2010), that he find a photograph of a very over the design, which was never realized. Cantor had initially ap- passing a space 115 metres by 420 metres (380 feet by 1,380 feet) and its interior equivalent, the open plan, which provided unprecedented large space, perhaps an industrial structure, and then transform it proached Mies to design a bowling alley and also commissioned a 45 metres (150 feet) high, Giedion called this limitless space ‘an un- spatial freedom. The text emphasized that the building was a single into a concert hall for 3,000 people by hanging acoustic partitions. house design from him, which remained unbuilt, of which there are precedented conquest of matter’.6 large area, which allowed for ‘every flexibility in use’11 – something Campagna worked with an interior image of the Glenn L Martin Air- also many drawings 411–414.15 The roof of the Cantor Drive-In is a thin now achievable with the modern structural type of the steel frame. craft Assembly Building in Middle River, , . Built plane hung from the bottom of two long trusses and concealing its An earlier historian, Alfred Gotthold Meyer (1920–1998), also alluded Flexibility would become the raison d’etre and hallmark of Mies’s around 1938 by Albert Kahn (1869–1942), the structure had appeared own structure within, even though that structure is integral to the to a technological sublime when he maintained that structures like the pursuit of universal space. Notwithstanding the elegance of this system, in journals as well as George Nelson’s 1939 monograph on the archi- stability of the trusses above it. The roof plane forms the ceiling of Galerie des Machines, Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower (1889) intro- Mies also developed his interest in the long-span industrial shed as tect, which Mies owned 406.12 Mies suggested Campagna enlarge the the interior at the same time as it extends beyond the glass box to duced not only a new scale but also a new atmospheric spatiality and an alternative spatial model. His museum incorporated a fragment of image of the building to 1 metre (3 feet) and use the technique of col- create sheltering overhangs, which he would develop in later projects a new steely beauty.7 Phyllis Lambert noted that an enlarged copy of such a structure, for the roof of the auditorium, where two steel beams lage, cutting and pasting paper to create acoustic partitions and thus 408. Walls of varied heights demarcate different areas within the res- the famous photograph of the Galerie des Machines was found in the running above the roof plane support the shaped acoustic ceiling making a room within the otherwise undivided interior space.13 The taurant: low and intermediate walls for seating areas, and full-height Mies Collection of the University Archives of IIT, mounted on board within 403. Mies turned directly to the long-span structure, however, result was later repeated with minor variations by other students and walls for portions of the . The chairs Mies imagined were his with grommet holes, which suggests it was used for teaching.8 She in designing the Concert Hall. collaborators and held the germ of all the clear-span pavilions that own MR10 cantilevered chairs, designed in 1927. describes this as ‘an indication of the powerful alliance of space and Mies would go on to design, from the Cantor Drive-In project to Crown structure in [Mies’s] mind’9 and a possible inspiration for the Foundry In coming to America, Mies must have been struck by the prevalence Hall, the Mannheim Theatre project (1952–3), Bacardi Building project Giedion once called the Eiffel Tower a body without flesh. Mies’s proj- Hall of his Minerals and Metals Building of 1941–3 and Concert Hall of long-span light-weight steel structures. He must have recognized (1957–61), Chicago Federal Centre (1959–64), Toronto-Dominion Cen- ect recalls images of skeletal structures such as those that populated project. If the Minerals and Metals Building was Mies’s first effort to in the discourse on economy, speed and flexibility so many of the ideas tre (1963–9) and New National Gallery in Berlin (1962–8). Mies’s own the scientific literature in his library. The drama of the gesture was express structure in America, it was also his first clear-span building. that he himself had helped promote in the early 1920s. Already a version of the photocollage 407, more than 1.5 metres (5 feet) long, accentuated by running the two 46.3 metre (152 foot) trusses longitu- He had been exposed to this type while working for Peter Behrens on popular form of industrial construction prior to America’s entry into placed a grey plane on the floor to mark the audience area, hung a dinally rather than across the shorter span, which would have been the AEG Turbine Factory back in 1909–10 417. His article on ‘industrial World War I, the long-span shed with its the uninterrupted floor area white acoustic plane above it and wrapped it with a combination of more conventional and economical. As a result, the trusses are he- construction’ of 1924 was illustrated with a contemporary industrial became the standard for manufacturing airplanes for the war effort. straight and curved free-standing walls in yellow, brown and black. In roic in scale and support a large neon sign to produce a Constructivist shed by Behrens of 1910 as well as a barn by Hugo Häring of 1924–5 Savings in material and labour were appreciated, as were the virtues the foreground Mies placed a sculpture of a seated figure by Aristide image that would have been striking from the highway 409. Cantor that used modern laminated wood.10 of welding. Articles in architectural journals treated the design of Maillol (1861–1944), which was later replaced with one of an Egyptian had called for a strong identity from the road. Moreover, the trusses

284 Unfolding Structure Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span 285 403

406

404

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 405 407

286 Unfolding Structure Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span 287 428

296 Unfolding Structure Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span 297 429

431

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 430 432

298 Unfolding Structure Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span 299 433 Farnsworth House; view of living space with curtains half drawn

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

434

433

adapted to reveal the unitary great hall with an unprecedented degree it? Unfortunately, Mies himself never provided a direct answer; nor the ends of the building, accentuating the impression that the glass concluded that ‘the best way to enclose this complicated spatial organ- of transparency. As built, Crown Hall deviated from the rest of the can his design practices be distilled into a single, simple or clear re- box is held within the structural armature and cantilevered beyond it ism was to cover it with a huge column-free hall of steel and coloured campus more substantially, introducing a 3 metre (10 foot) building sponse. Certainly we could say that the expression of structure was 443. Instead of the five structural bays of the original scheme, there glass or, to express it differently, to place this whole theatre organism module, all glass enclosure, and long-span structural bay of 18 metres an important ingredient of clear construction. At Crown Hall that meant are only three larger bays, each of which is subdivided into six minor inside such a hall.’28 To create the effect of a single large interior, all the by 37 metres (60 feet by 120 feet) 435–437, 442. Its exceptional status placing the structure on the outside of the building – rather than on the bays containing windows. These minor bays are formed with H-section enclosed rooms on the main level are located in the centre of the plan. within the campus is not merely a testimony to the importance that Mies inside – running plate girders above the roof and supporting them on columns welded to the horizontal beams of the roof and the continuous Visitors stroll in a 12 metre (40 foot)-high ambulatory around this core, might have assigned his school; rather it speaks to a fundamentally H-section columns integrated into the perimeter envelop. Using a C-channel around the perimeter of the concrete floor; they protrude viewing the panorama outside at the same time as the internal opera- different approach to the education of architecture. It was built without clear-span structure was surely also important for achieving a free from the outer surface to create shadow and profile, just as do the tions of the theatre. This was a result of the fact that, as Mies explained, classrooms and hence the need to conform to the 7.3 metre (24 foot) ground plan, although a clear construction could be attained with I-beams on the curtain wall 438, 440. In the lower section of the win- ‘In the Mannheim building, stage and auditorium are independent of campus grid, which had been predicated on classrooms. There were other structural types as well, such as the high-rise skeleton and the dows, these bays are further divided into two. A broad platform hov- the steel construction. The large auditorium juts out from its concrete also no lecture halls or faculty . Instead, Crown Hall offers ‘one low-rise repeated frame. Judging from the buildings, clear construc- ers outside the main entrance midway up the stairs as at the Farnsworth base much like a hand from the wrist.’29 The two theatres – one at either big room’, as Mies put it, 37 metres by 67 metres (120 feet by 220 feet) tion requires that an uncompromised, integrated and unified form be House. Inside, an acoustic ceiling is hung tight to the underside of the end – are open to view from the ambulatory and even from the outside by 5.5 metres (18 feet) high, surrounded by glass walls that were trans- achieved, one that reveals itself not only as abstract geometry but also roof structure and fills the box to the perimeter glass wall, where it is 451. With the main floor lifted above the ground, resting on low walls lucent for the lower 2.7 metres (9 feet) to shield the calm interior from in its dependence upon a material system of construction. A clear revealed as a hovering plane. Lighting strips and ventilators are of green marble that extend beyond the building, the main auditorium outside activity while letting the sky provide a gently changing tableau construction implies the articulation of every element of a construction crisply integrated flush with the acoustic panels. The floor is terrazzo itself becomes a stage visible from outside. The exoskeleton once through the upper ribbon of clear glass. A multipurpose area occupies type or system, both in itself (as an individuated and separated ele- with white and dark grey stones. Stairs are open holes to the level again features open trusses, which are 8 metres (26 feet) deep and run the centre of the building, flanked on either side by open studios usu- ment) and in its relationship to other elements (as part of a larger below, their railings reduced to tiny steel sections so that they almost across the short dimension of the building. The fly tower protrudes ally populated with rows of drafting tables. Just beyond the free- whole). Sharp outlines, smooth surfaces, precise lines, elemental disappear. Two ventilation shafts and utility chases run from floor to above the roof as a small prismatic block and is barely visible from the standing walls of this central space, stairs lead to the lower level, which geometry, harmonic proportions and reveal joints all contribute to ceiling; they are finished in white plaster so as to be distinct from the ground. Earlier sketches and a collage for a theatre of 1947 show a housed the Institute for Design and now houses offices, workshops, produce not only the fact of clear construction but its appearance as language of structure and thereby avoid being mistaken as supportive more exuberantly shaped auditorium ceiling, transforming the hung the library and other support facilities 444. The life of the school is well. It was in this sense that those who taught with Mies saw the di- piers. The oak panelled walls of the multipurpose space create a recep- plane of the earlier Concert Hall into a graceful arc 446, 449. The supported with minimal subdivision in order to maximize flexibility dactic value of Crown Hall. ‘What other school,’ remarked Goldsmith, tion/office area facing the north entrance and storage closets. diagonal rake of the seating cantilevers boldly up in the opposite but also shared experiences – to see and be seen. Open to the main ‘has a building where the students work in a building that is an embodi- direction as a counterpoint. While curtains can be used to screen the entrance, the multipurpose space is also open to the studios on either ment of the ideas that are being taught.’25 Invited around 1952 to participate in a competition for a new building interior, the spirit of the building is open, public, visible, even theatrical, side and is typically used for lectures, exhibitions and other gatherings for the National Theatre in Mannheim, Germany, Mies produced albeit within a recessive architecture. When the client extended the 445. Peter Carter, who worked with Mies in the later period, pointed Instead of the open trusses of the Cantor Drive-In, here Mies used plate another version of the long-span pavilion, this time confronting a need competition into a second stage, Mies declined to participate further. out that within the single hall students at different levels were aware girders 1.9 metres (6 feet 3 inches) deep, the surfaces of which have for more functionally determined rooms.27 The program sought of all stages of the curriculum and could participate fully within it. an elemental geometry of flanges and webs similar to the H-section to combine opera and theatre on two stages. As Mies observed, this All of the projects discussed in this chapter employ similar techniques columns, thereby enabling a single language of structure to be devel- required spaces of two types: stages and workshops with large column- for articulating individual elements and their relationships, concealing In an interview of 1958, Mies explained that the variable ground plan oped for using only horizontal and vertical planes 439. Joseph Fujikawa free areas and small rooms for many different purposes. He accom- as well as registering the inherent forces of their structure. The form depended on what he called ‘clear construction’. ‘The variable ground (1922–2003), who worked on the project, recalled that it may have been modated the former in an upper storey 12 metres (40 feet) in height, of the elements and the constructive logic of the buildings as a whole plan and a clear construction cannot be viewed separately,’ he said. the exigency of making a quick model with solid strips of cardboard while the latter were organized in a lower level 4 metres (13 feet) in are accentuated through the display of modularity, geometric abstrac- ‘Clear construction is the basis for a free ground plan.’23 Elsewhere he for the trusses that inspired Mies to use plate girders.26 These supre- height. Overall the building is 80 metres by 160 metres (260 feet by 525 tion, reduction, simplification of surfaces, sharpening of outlines and called Crown Hall the ‘clearest construction we have achieved’.24 But matist bents appear less heroic than those of the Cantor Drive-In and feet), with structural bays of 24 metres by 80 metres (80 feet by 260 unifying harmonic proportions, as well as transparency and external- why exactly was clarity so important? And what did it take to achieve run across the shorter dimension of the building. There are none at feet) and a building module of 4 metres (13 feet) 447, 448, 450. Mies had ized structure. It was through these techniques of separating and

300 Unfolding Structure Farnsworth to Crown Hall: Clear Span 301 621 Mies van der Rohe, One , 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

621 622 625

623 624 626

426 Unfolding Structure Lafayette Park: City Landscape 427 627 629

627 Mies van der Rohe, , 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 plan 628 630

428 Unfolding Structure Lafayette Park: City Landscape 429 631 633

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 632

634

430 Unfolding Structure Lafayette Park: City Landscape 431 635 637 638

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 636 639

432 Unfolding Structure Lafayette Park: City Landscape 433 640 641

643

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 642 644

434 Unfolding Structure Lafayette Park: City Landscape 435