SKIN & BONES LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE
Mies Van der Rohe in Chicago, 1960
TABLE OF CONTENTS 1-2 3足-4 5-8 9-10 11-12 13-16 17-18 19-20 21-22 23-24 25-26
EARLY CAREER TRADITIONALISM TO MODERNISM BARCELONA PAVILION VILLA TUGENDHAT CAREER IN THE UNITED STATES FARNSWORTH HOUSE 860-880 LAKE SHORE DRIVE SEAGRAM BUILDING NEW NATIONAL GALLERY, BERLIN FURNITURE COMPLETE LIST OF WORKS
EARLY CAREER
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Mies Van der Rohe in Chicago, 1960 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (March 27, 1886–August 17, 1969) was a German architect. Mies van der Rohe, along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, are widely regarded as the pioneering masters of Modern architecture. Mies, like many of his post World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential twentieth century architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces. He strived towards an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of free-flowing open space. He called his buildings “skin and bones” architecture, seeking a rational approach that would guide the creative process of
architectural design. He is often associated with the aphorisms “less is more” and “God is in the details”. Mies worked in his father’s stone-carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin joining the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture, working alongside Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens. His talent was quickly recognized and he soon began independent commissions, despite his lack of a formal college-level education. A physically imposing, deliberative, and reticent man, Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his rapid transformation from a tradesman’s son to an architect
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working with Berlin’s cultural elite, adding “van der” and his mother’s surname “Rohe”, using the Dutch, rather than the German form, presumably to avoid offending those of genuine aristocratic lineage. He began his independent professional career designing upper class homes, joining the movement seeking a return to the purity of early nineteenth century Germanic domestic styles. He admired the broad proportions, regularity of rhythmic elements, attention to the relationship of the man-made to nature, and compositions using simple cubic forms of the early nineteenth century Prussian Neo-Classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He dismissed the eclectic and cluttered classical styles so common at the turn of the twentieth century as irrelevant to the modern times. Mies pursued an ambitious lifelong mission to create a new architectural language that could be used to represent the new era of technology and production. He saw a need for an architecture expressive of and in harmony with his epoch, just as Gothic architecture was for an era of spiritualism.
He applied a disciplined design process using rational thought to achieve his spiritual goals. He believed that the configuration and arrangement of every architectural element, particularly including the character of enclosed space, must contribute to a unified expression. The self-educated Mies painstakingly studied the great philosophers and thinkers, past and present, to enhance his own understanding of the character and essential qualities of the technological times he lived in. Every aspect of his architecture, from overall concept to the smallest detail, supports his effort to express the modern age. The depth of meaning conveyed by his work, beyond its aesthetic qualities, has drawn many contemporary philosophers and theoretical thinkers to continue to further explore and speculate about his architecture.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Old Museum, Berlin, 1823
TRADITIONALISM TO MODERNISM 3
Glass Skyscaper Floorplan, 1922 After World War I, Mies began, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, a parallel experimental effort. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the contradictions of hiding modern construction technology with a facade of ornamented traditional styles. The mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after World War I, a disaster widely seen as a failure of the old world order of imperial leadership of Europe. The aristocratic classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited and outmoded social system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process
guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure rather than the superficial application of classical facades. While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass FriedrichstraĂ&#x;e skyscraper in 1921, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper. He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now
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built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, completed in 1930. He joined the German avant-garde, working with the progressive design magazine G which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects. Mies' modernist thinking was influenced by many of the design and art movements of the day. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural constructions using modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and
beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies. The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of eradication of the superficial and unnecessary, replacing elaborate applied ornament with the straightforward display of materials and forms. Loos had famously declared, in the tongue-in-cheek humor of the day, that "ornament is a crime". Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.
FriedrichstraĂ&#x;e Skyscaper, 1921
Glass Skyscaper, 1922
THE BARCELONA PAVILION 5
Barcelona Pavilion, 1929 The Barcelona Pavilion, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain. This building was used for the official opening of the German section of the exhibition. It is an important building in the history of modern architecture, known for its simple form and its spectacular use of extravagant materials, such as marble, red onyx and travertine. The same features of minimalism and spectacular can be applied to the prestigious furniture specifically designed for the building, among which the iconic Barcelona chair. Mies was offered the commission of this building in 1928 after his successful administration of the 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart. The German Republic entrusted Mies with the artistic management and erection of not only the Barcelona Pavilion, but for the buildings for all the German sections
at the 1929 Universal Exhibition. However, Mies had severe time constraints—he had to design the Barcelona Pavilion in less than a year—and was also dealing with uncertain economic conditions. In the years following World War I, Germany started to turn around. The economy started to recover after the 1924 Dawes Plan. The pavilion for the Universal Exhibition was supposed to represent the new Weimar Germany: democratic, culturally progressive, prospering, and thoroughly pacifist; a self-portrait through architecture. The Commissioner, Georg von Schnitzler said it should give “voice to the spirit of a new era”. This concept was carried out with the realization of the “Free plan” and the “Floating room”. Mies’s response to the proposal by von Schnitzler was radical. After rejecting the original site because of aesthetic reasons, Mies agreed to a quiet site at the narrow side of a
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wide, diagonal axis, where the pavilion would still offer viewpoints and a route leading to one of the exhibition’s main attractions, the “Spanish Village”. The pavilion was going to be bare, no trade exhibits, just the structure accompanying a single sculpture and purpose-designed furniture (the Barcelona Chair). This lack of accommodation enabled Mies to treat the Pavilion as a continuous space; blurring inside and outside. “The design was predicated on an absolute distinction between structure and enclosure—a regular grid of cruciform steel columns interspersed by freely spaced planes”. However, the structure was more of a hybrid style, some of these planes also acted as supports. The floor plan is very simple. The entire building rests on a plinth of travertine. A southern U-shaped enclosure, also of travertine, helps form a service annex and a large water basin. The floor slabs of the pavilion project out and over the pool—once again connecting inside and out. Another U-shaped wall on the opposite side of the site also forms a smaller
water basin. This is where the statue by Georg Kolbe sits. The roof plates, relatively small, are supported by the chrome-clad, cruciform columns. This gives the impression of a hovering roof. Robin Evans said that the reflective columns appear to be struggling to hold the “floating” roof plane down, not to be bearing its weight. Mies wanted this building to become “an ideal zone of tranquillity” for the weary visitor, who should be invited into the pavilion on the way to the next attraction. Since the pavilion lacked a real exhibition space, the building itself was to become the exhibit. The pavilion was designed to “block” any passage through the site, rather, one would have to go through the building. Visitors would enter by going up a few stairs, and due to the slightly sloped site, would leave at ground level in the direction of the “Spanish Village”. The visitors were not meant to be led in a straight line through the building, but to take continuous turnabouts. The walls not only created space, but also directed visitor’s movements. This was achieved by wall surfaces being displaced
Barcelona Pavilion Exterior Pool, 1929
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against each other, running past each other, and creating a space that became narrower or wider. Another unique feature of this building is the exotic materials Mies chose. Plates of high-grade stone materials like veneers of Tinos verde antico marble and golden onyx as well as tinted glass of grey, green, white, as well as translucent glass, perform exclusively as spatial dividers. Because this was planned as an exhibition pavilion, it was intended to exist only temporarily. The building was torn down in early 1930, not even a year after it was completed. However, thanks to black-and-white photos and original plans, a group of Spanish architects reconstructed the pavilion permanently between 1983 and 1986. The Pavilion was not only a pioneer for construction forms with a fresh, disciplined understanding of space, but also for modelling new opportunities for an association of free art and architecture. Mies placed Georg Kolbe’s Alba in the small water basin, leaving the larger one all the more empty. The sculpture also ties into
the highly reflective materials Mies used—he chose the place where these optical effects would have the strongest impact; the building offers multiple views of Alba. “From now on, in the sense of equality for juxtaposing building and visual work, sculptures were no longer to be applied retrospectively to the building, but rather to be a part of the spatial design, to help define and interpret it.”
Barcelona Pavilion Exterior, 1929
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Barcelona Pavilion Interior & Barcelona Chairs, 1929
VILLA TUGENDHAT 9
Villa Tugendhat Exterior, 1930 Villa Tugendhat is a historical building in Brno, Czech Republic. It is one of the pioneering prototypes of modern architecture in Europe, and was designed by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Built of reinforced concrete between the years 1928-1930 for Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Greta, the villa soon became an icon of modernism. Rohe's design principle of "less is more" and accent on functional amenities of the house created a fine example of early functionalism architecture, a grounbreaking new vision in building design at the time. Mies used the revolutionary iron framework which enabled him to dispense with supporting walls and arrange the interior in order to achieve a feeling of space and light. He also designed all furniture. There were no paintings or decorative items in the villa but the interior was by no means austere due to the use of naturally
patterned materials such as the captivating onyx wall and rare tropical woods. The onyx wall is partially translucent and changes appearance when the evening sun is low. The architect also managed to make the magificient view from the villa an integral part of the interior. The cost of building the villa was very high due to the unusual construction method, the luxurious materials, very modern technology of heating, ventilation, etc. It is also quite large for a family house, a fact which may escape casual visitors since the elegant simplicity of the rooms used by the family is compensated by a very large space occupied by various utility rooms. Fritz and Greta Tugendhat, who were Jewish, left Czechoslovakia with their children in 1938, shortly before the country was dismembered following the Munich Agreement. They lived in Switzerland and never returned. The house was confiscated by Gestapo
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in 1939 and next used as apartment and office; its interior was senselessly modified and many pieces disappeared. It suffered considerable damages during combat operation at the end of World War II and later, when it shortly served as a quarter and stable for soviet military. It was partially repaired and exploited for several various practical purposes for more decades after World War II. It has been inscribed into Country List of Cultural Heritage in 1969 and rebuild after 1980. In 1992 the political leaders of Czechoslovakia met there to sign the document that formally divided the country into the present separate states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Since 1994 the villa has been open to the public as a museum administered by the city of Brno. Villa Tugendhat was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001. In 2007 the heirs of Fritz and Greta have formally applied for the restitution of the villa, citing a law covering works of art confiscated during the Holocaust. The reason for this application appears to be frustration
over the failure of the municipality of Brno to carry out vital restoration work due to the deterioration of the concrete used in construction. The house was a principal location in the 2007 film Hannibal Rising, serving as the Villa of the villain, Vladis Gutas. Simon Mawer's 2009 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, The Glass Room, is a fictional account of a house inspired primarily by the Villa Tugendhat.A reconstruction and restoration of the villa started in February 2010 with estimated costs of 150 million CZK (app. 5,769,000 EUR; 7,895,000 USD). This reconstruction finished in February 2012 and villa was reopen to the public on 29 February, 2012.
Villa Tugendhat Interior, 1930
CAREER IN THE UNITED STATES 11
Mies Van der Rohe with Crown Hall Model, 1956 Commission opportunities dwindled with the worldwide depression after 1929. In the early 1930s, Mies served briefly as the last Director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. After 1933, Nazi political pressure soon forced Mies to close the government financed school. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character. Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Here he introduced a new kind of education and attitude later known as Second Chicago School,
which became very influential in the following decades in North America and Europe. Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago’s Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the Chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT’s School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies’ finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture. The school strove to transform its traditional architecture program into one of international stature and innovation; Mies was a logical choice for achieving this goal. He had achieved international recognition at the forefront of modern architecture and
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established a reputation in the field of architectural education while serving as director of the Bauhaus school of design in Germany from 1930 to 1933. In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach towards achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He focused his efforts on enclosing open and adaptable “universal� spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring prefabricated steel shapes filled in with large sheets of glass. His early projects at the IIT campus, and for developer Herb Greenwald, opened the eyes of Americans to a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations. Mies worked
from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include in Chicago and the area: the residential towers of 860-880 Lake Shore Dr, the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT; and the Seagram Building in New York.
Crown Hall, 1956
FARNSWORTH HOUSE 13
Farnsworth House, 1951 The Farnsworth House is one of the most significant of Mies van der Rohe’s works, equal in importance to such canonical monuments as the Barcelona Pavilion, built for the 1929 International Exposition and the 1954-58 Seagram Building New York. Its significance is two-fold. First, as one of a long series of house projects, the Farnsworth House embodies a certain aesthetic culmination in Mies van der Rohe’s experiment with this building type. Second, the house is perhaps the fullest expression of modernist ideals that had begun in Europe, but which were consummated in Plano, Illinois. As historian Maritz Vandenburg has written in his monograph on the Farnsworth House: “Every physical element has been distilled to its irreducible essence. The interior is unprecedentedly transparent to the surrounding site, and also unprecedentedly uncluttered in itself. All of the paraphernalia of traditional living—
rooms, walls, doors, interior trim, loose furniture, pictures on walls, even personal possessions—have been virtually abolished in a puritanical vision of simplified, transcendental existence. Mies had finally achieved a goal towards which he had been feeling his way for three decades.” In many ways, Mies van der Rohe was able to realize spatial and structural ideals that were impossible in larger projects, such as the Seagram Building. For example, the I-beams of the Farnsworth House are both structural and expressive, whereas in the Seagram Building they are attached to exterior as symbols for what is necessarily invisible behind fireproof cladding. In addition, the one-story Farnsworth house with its isolated site allowed a degree of transparency and simplicity impossible in the larger, more urban projects. The significance of the Farnsworth House was recognized even before it was built. In 1947
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a model of the Farnsworth House was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Describing it, along with the unbuilt Resor House, as a “radical departure from his last European domestic projects,” Philip Johnson noted that it went further than the Resor house in its expression of the floating volume: “The Farnsworth house with its continuous glass walls is an even simpler interpretation of an idea. Here the purity of the cage is undisturbed. Neither the steel columns from which it is suspended nor the independent floating terrace break the taut skin.” In the actual construction, the aesthetic idea was progressively refined and developed through the choices of materials, colors and details. While subsequent debates and lawsuits sometimes questioned the practicality and livability of its design, the Farnsworth House would increasingly be considered, by architects and scholars alike, to constitute one of the crystallizing and pivotal moments of Mies van der Rohe’s long artistic career. First conceived in 1945 as a country retreat for the
client, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, the house as finally built appears as a structure of Platonic perfection against a complementary ground of informal landscape. This landscape is an integral aspect of Mies van der Rohe’s aesthetic conception. The house faces the Fox River just to the south and is raised 5 feet 3 inches above the ground, its thin, white I-beam supports contrasting with the darker, sinuous trunks of the surrounding trees. The calm stillness of the man-made object contrasts also with the subtle movements, sounds, and rhythms of water, sky and vegetation. The dominance of a single, geometric form in a pastoral setting, with a complete exclusion of extraneous elements normally associated with habitation, reinforces the architect’s statement about the potential of a building to express “dwelling” in its simplest essence. While the elongated rectangle of the house lies parallel to the course of the Fox River, the perpendicular cross axis, represented by the suspended stairways, faces the river directly. With its emphatically planar floors and roof suspended
Farnsworth House Interior, 1951
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on the widely-spaced, steel columns, the one-story house appears to float above the ground, infinitely extending the figurative space of the hovering planes into the surrounding site. At the same time, the prismatic composition of the house maintains a sense of boundary and centrality against the vegetative landscape, thus maintaining its temple-like aloofness. The great panes of glass redefine the character of the boundary between shelter and that which is outside. The exterior glazing and the intermittent partitions of the interior work together dialectically, shifting the viewer’s awareness between the thrill of exposure to the raw elements of nature and the comforting stability of architectonic enclosure. The architecture of the house represents the ultimate refinement of Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist expression of structure and space. It is composed of three strong, horizontal steel forms—the terrace, the floor of the house, and the roof—attached to attenuated, steel flange columns.Since its completion in 1951, the Farnsworth house has been meticulously maintained
and restored. The most important restoration took place in 1972, when then owner Peter Palumbo hired the firm of Mies van der Rohe’s grandson, Dirk Lohan, to restore the house to its original 1951 appearance. A second restoration took place in 1996, after a devastating flood damaged the interior. Although the house was built to resist floods in 1951, building in the surrounding area has caused higher flood levels in recent decades.
Farnsworth House Exterior, 1951
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Farnsworth House Exterior, 1951
860-880 LAKE SHORE DRIVE 17
860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, 1951 Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herb Greenwald: the 860-880 and 900-910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with facades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass enclosed lobby. The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an
expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired. Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears to be similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other. Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement
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860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, 1951
SEAGRAM BUILDING 19
Seagram Building Interior, 1958 In 1958, Mies van der Rohe designed what is often regarded as the pinnacle of the modernist high-rise architecture, the Seagram Building in New York City. Mies was chosen by the daughter of the client, Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, who has become a noted architectural figure and patron in her own right. The Seagram Building has become an icon of the growing power of the corporation, that defining institution of the twentieth century. In a bold and innovative move, the architect chose to set the tower back from the property line to create a forecourt plaza and fountain on Park Avenue. Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped
mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what was structurally necessary. Detractors criticized it as having committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant, which has endured un-remodeled to today. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently. Using the Seagram as a prototype, Mies' office designed a number of modern high-rise office towers, notably the Chicago Federal Center, which includes the Dirksen and Kluczynski Federal Buildings and Post Office (1959) and the IBM Plaza in Chicago; the Westmount Square in Montreal, and the Toronto-Dominion Centre in 1967. The 38-story structure combines a steel moment frame
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and a steel and reinforced concrete core for lateral stiffness. The concrete core shear walls extend up to the 17th floor, and diagonal core bracing extends to the 29th floor. According to Severud Associates, the structural engineering consultants, it was the first tall building to use high strength bolted connections, the first tall building to combine a braced frame with a moment frame, one of the first tall buildings to use a vertical truss bracing system and the first tall building to employ a composite steel and concrete lateral frame. On completion, the construction costs of Seagram made it the world’s most expensive skyscraper at the time, due to the use of expensive, high-quality materials and lavish interior decoration including bronze, travertine, and marble. The interior was designed to assure cohesion with the external features, repeated in the glass and bronze furnishings and decorative scheme. Another interesting feature of the Seagram Building is the window blinds. As was common with International style architects, Mies wanted the building to have
Seagram Building, 1958
a uniform appearance. One aspect of a façade which Mies disliked, was the disordered irregularity when window blinds are drawn. Inevitably, people using different windows will draw blinds to different heights, making the building
Seagram Building Exterior, 1958
NEW NATIONAL GALLERY, BERLIN 21
New National Gallery, 1968 Mies’s last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery, in Berlin. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for larger scale art. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the buildings actual built area in more functional spaces for galleries, support and utilitarian rooms. The campus of Whitney Young High School and the adjacent Chicago Police Academy are
two examples of the influence van der Rohe had on Chicago architecture.The Gallery, otherwise known as the “temple of light and glass” houses the collection of 20th century European painting and sculpture. Ranging from early modern art to art of the 1960s, the collection includes works by Munch, Kirchner, Picasso, Klee, Feininger, Dix, Kokoschka, and many others. The New National Gallery is dedicated to collecting and exhibiting international art from the 20th century. The museum was founded in the 1960s, the result of a search for a permanent place to house modern art in the western part of the then divided city. After the Second World War, parts of the original collection were expanded with a series of principal acquisitions and provisionally placed on view as part of the ‘Gallery of the Twentieth Century’ in Charlottenburg and Tiergarten. It was against this backdrop that the architect Mies
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van der Rohe was commissioned to construct a permanent home for the collection of modern art at the Kulturforum opposite the Philharmonie. In 1968, the New National Gallery opened its doors and was soon to become celebrated around the world as a shining symbol of modern architecture. With his pavilion construction suffused with light, Mies van der Rohe had created an open universal space that is unique and which allows each exhibition held inside it to become an exciting event in itself. The New National Gallery forms one of the six pillars that make up the National Gallery; with the other five being: the Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery) on the Museum Island Berlin, the Museum Berggruen and the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg in Charlottenburg, the Hamburger Bahnhof— Museum für Gegenwart—Berlin in Tiergarten and the Friedrichswerder Church at Schlossplatz. The turn of the last century saw the expansion of the National Gallery’s collection to include European and contemporary art under the helm of its then
director, Hugo von Tschudi. His successor, Ludwig Justi, subsequently oversaw the transfer of these new works to a New Wing which opened in the Kronprinzenpalais in 1919 and rapidly grew to be one of the leading collections of contemporary art of its day. Until 1933, several major exhibitions of contemporary artists were held there and countless acquisitions of significant works of the period of classical modernism were made.
New National Gallery Interior, 1968
FURNITURE
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Barcelona Chairs, 1929 In his mid twenties, Mies met and formed a personal and professional partnership with Lilly Reich the interior designer, and began to design laminated wood furniture, out of his own Berlin Appartment —registering a patent in 1927 for a tubular steel cantilever chair based on that of Mart Stam. The MR chair or ‘M20 Chair’ as it was called has been described as “a sophisticated and elegant aesthetic response to the earlier, slightly more prosaic uses of the cantilever in contemporary furntiure”. The chair was manufacturer by the Joseph Muller Metal Company, and just like his later designs it required a great deal of handcrafting, and was very expensive to make. It was this chair that made Mies famous at first, catapulting him into the international limelight. Establishing and cementing his philosophy of ‘Refined Comfort’, the ‘M20’, has a simple curved frame with a cane
seat - affording sufficient ‘give’ in the back to almost psychologically mimic the imagined comfort of an old fashioned armchair. Compact, light weight and yet elegant its space saving comfort was immediately a worldwide success. The famous ‘Barcelona X Chair’ chair followed in 1929, a design created together with Lilly Reich for the his German Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exhibition. The Barcelona Chair design is said to be derived from his interpretation of an Egyptian royal folding chair and a Roman folding footstool, it came to define the genre, an icon for the era and perhaps the whole modern movement. His career continued and blossomed first as the director of the Bauhaus school in Berlin 1930-1933 where he produced further innovative design successes - including his cantilevered design of the ‘Brno’ and the ‘Tugendhat’ chairs. In 1931
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manufacture of Mies’ furniture including the Barcelona Chair was taken over by the Bamberg Metal workshops in Berlin , although there was a marked move away from what had been essentially a craft based mode of production when the production of the production of the cantilever chair was taken over by Thonet in 1932. Then in the late 1930s as the 2nd world war approached Mies, like many of the Bauhaus teachers, had the foresight to relocate to the US, where he developed a world renowned architectural practice, producing some of his seminal works. Among them the Farnsworth House 1945-1950), the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago 1951-1958. He produced no more furniture after leaving Germany, although he did redesign the Barcelona Chair om the 1950s to take advantage of new manufacturing techniques and the invention of stainless steel. In 1948 license to produce the Barcelona Chair and a number of his other furniture designs were purchased by the wife of Hans Knoll, Florence Knoll, whom Mies and Breuer
had met while she was working for Gropius. In the 1960s Florence retired from Knoll, but the company continues to produce the Barcelona Chair to this day, together with a matching range of furnture not designed by Mies including the Barcelona Ottoman, Barcelona Daybed and the Barcelona Benches two and three seat. Mies designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames.
Tugendhat Chair, 1930
COMPLETE LIST OF WORKS 25
CANADA Toronto - Dominion Centre - Office Tower Complex, Toronto Westmount Square - Office & Residential Tower Complex, Westmount Nuns' Island - 3 Residential towers and a filling station (closed), Montreal (c.1969) CZECH REPUBLIC Tugendhat House - Residential Home, Brno GERMANY Riehl House - Residential Home, Potsdam (1907) Perl House - Residential Home, Zehlendorf (1911) Werner House - Residential Home, Zehlendorf (1913) Urbig House - Residential Home, Potsdam (1917) Kempner House - Residential Home, Charlottenburg (1922) Eichstaedt House - Residential Home, Wannsee (1922) Feldmann House - Residential Home, Wilmersdorf (1922) Mosler House - Residential Home, Babelsberg (1926) Weissenhof Estate - Housing Exhibition coordinated by Mies and with a contribution by him, Stuttgart (1927) Lemke House - Residential Home, Weissensee (1932) Haus Lange/Haus Ester - Residential Home and an art museum, Krefeld New National Gallery - Modern Art Museum, Berlin MEXICO Bacardi Office Building - Office Building, Mexico City SPAIN Barcelona Pavilion - World's Fair Pavilion, Barcelona UNITED STATES Cullinan Hall - Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Promontory Apartments - Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library - District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C. Richard King Mellon Hall of Science - Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA (1968) IBM Plaza - Office Tower, Chicago Meredith Hall - College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, IA Lake Shore Drive Apartments - Residential Apartment Towers, Chicago Seagram Building - Office Tower, New York City (1958) Crown Hall - College of Architecture, and other buildings, at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1956) University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration - Chicago, IL (1965) Farnsworth House - Residential Home, Plano, Illinois (1946)
SKIN & BONES
26
Chicago Federal Center Dirksen Federal Building - Office Tower, Chicago Kluczynski Federal Building - Office Tower, Chicago United States Post Office Loop Station - General Post Office, Chicago One Illinois Center - Office Tower, Chicago One Charles Center - Office Tower, Baltimore, Maryland Highfield House Condominium | 4000 North Charles - Condominium Apartments, Baltimore, Maryland Colonnade and Pavilion Apartments - Residential Apartment Complex, Newark, New Jersey (1959) Lafayette Park - Residential Apartment Complex, Detroit, Michigan (1963).[7] Commonwealth Promenade Apartments - Residential Apartment Complex, Chicago (1957)[8] Caroline Weiss Law Building, Cullinan Hall (1958) and Brown Pavilion (1974), Museum of Fine Art, Houston Richard King Mellon Building (1968) at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh American Life Building - Louisville, Kentucky (1973; completed after Mies's death by Bruno Conterato)