A PhD in the Best Sense

Adjunct Associate Professor Marianne Eggler, PhD

Last fall, I deposited my doctoral dissertation, titled “‘A Decorator in the Best Sense’: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, the Fabric Curtain Partition, and the Articulation of the German Modern Interior,” and on February 1, 2023, I graduated with a Doctorate in the History of Art from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. As the opening paragraphs of my dissertation abstract explain:

Contributing to the burgeoning study of the domestic interior, a field of inquiry existing in the interstices of architecture, design, interior decoration, and material culture, this dissertation presents a thematic study of the modern domestic interiors of German/American architect/designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1965) designed in collaboration with fellow German architect/designer Lilly Reich (1885–1947) during the 1920s and early 1930s in Weimar Germany. Inspired by a revealing but hitherto overlooked statement by Philip Johnson in the catalogue for the influential 1932 International Style exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that referred to Mies as “a decorator in the best sense,” it focuses primarily on a particular aspect of Mies’s and Reich’s interiors, the moveable fabric partition wall, through the lens of the modernist bias against decoration and the hierarchical relationship between architecture and interior decorating. Reich’s significance as Mies’s partner, both professional and personal, is considered in relation to that gendered bias.

An underexplored but consistent feature of the Neues Bauen (modern architecture in Germany), the curtain partition was a central functional component in Mies’s celebrated open or free plan that also operated on a number of complex symbolic levels. Comprising both soft furnishing (an element of interior decor) and architectural form, the fabric wall was highly referential and innately opulent rather than reductive and abstract, reflecting key aspects of Weimar culture with its emphasis on dynamic movement, while on a more private level, indicative of a conception of domesticity undergoing profound change.

Using an interdisciplinary methodological approach, this study analyzes the curtain partition of Mies and Reich in relation to a series of significant themes, including functionalism and the nature of materials, interiority, domesticity, the decorative, the European fascination with the “primitive,” the tension between the timeless and the fashionable, constructions of gender and identity, and viewer subjectivity and reception. Operating as a kind of hinge between architecture and interior design/decoration, between opulence and simplicity, structure and surface, and historicism and modernism, the soft partitions of Mies and Reich constitute a dynamic entity that manifests the complex moment in which it was conceived.

The thesis for my dissertation was born during a graduate school course on Mies van der Rohe held in Spring 1998 at Columbia University and co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art. The course was a component of the major Mies retrospective organized jointly by the MoMA (Mies in Berlin) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (Mies in America), held in 2001. My dissertation advisor and mentor, Dr. Rosemarie Bletter, recommended me for the class, which was taught by Dr. Barry Bergdoll of Columbia’s art history department and the late Terence Riley, former curator of architecture and design at MoMA. As part of our study of Mies’s and Lilly Reich’s interiors, my study partner Miriam Torres and I interviewed the late

American architect Philip Johnson in his office in Mies’s Seagram Building in New York, quite a thrilling proposition for two graduate students! Johnson’s role in Mies’s rise to canonical status in the United States is well recognized, and hearing his anecdotes about organizing MoMA’s seminal 1932 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition was exciting, to say the least. That summer, I had the opportunity to travel to Europe with Dr. Bergdoll, Terry Riley, and members of the Mies seminar to study the buildings of Mies, and the interiors by Mies and Reich, in person. My knowledge of German (honed during four years in Munich in the 1980s) proved most helpful. In addition, I was invited to contribute two essays in MoMA’s Mies in Berlin exhibition catalogue.

Over the next years I researched my topic, using primary source material at the Mies van der Rohe Archive and the Lilly Reich Archive at MoMA as well as the Mies van der Rohe Papers at the Library of Congress, along with the extensive holdings of the New York Public Library’s Art and Architecture Collection in the Schwarzman Building. I also made extensive use of our own Gladys Marcus Library here at FIT, in particular, our Inter-library Loan program (a big thanks to everyone in ILL!) I successfully defended my dissertation in January 2007, with minor revisions, a task that took considerably longer than anticipated! And those revisions were finally completed and approved last fall 2022, making my progress, if not the longest gestation period for a dissertation from start to completion, than surely one for the record books.

The reasons for this extended time frame are varied and complex; my son was born in November 1998 (the Columbia/MoMA research trip to Europe had, fortunately, taken place just before I was no longer able to fly). Further, having discovered my love of teaching during grad school (the CUNY Graduate Center art history program was in fact founded to provide professors for the CUNY colleges), I served in both adjunct and fulltime professor capacities at various institutions in New York State and New Jersey throughout the period of my graduate coursework and the dissertation writing process. In 2007, I was hired for a tenure-track teaching position as design historian at SUNY Buffalo State College, and I commuted for a semester to work via JetBlue every week from my home in Brooklyn

(which in retrospect I do not recommend!) Unexpected twists of fate of a personal nature also resulted in disruptions to the writing process—in other words, sometimes life gets in the way.

In the end, though, my belief that Mies’s and Reich’s interiors, and specifically the idea that their use of “soft partitions” as a key element in their composition of the modern home deserved serious scholarly attention never wavered. I presented my research at a series of scholarly conferences, and a portion of my dissertation was published in the Bard Graduate Center’s journal Studies in the Decorative Arts in 2009. My next step is to revise the manuscript for publication as a book. In the meantime, I have been able to apply my expertise in the history/theory of the modern interior toward the creation of a new course at FIT: The Modern Interior as Space and Image (HA 220), which I am delighted to teach every fall. Perhaps most importantly, I can honestly say to our students that it is possible to overcome obstacles, to achieve your goals, and to graduate, at any age, no matter how long it takes, if you believe in yourself and your work.▪