Mies van der Rohe

What style of architecture predominates nowadays? It’s hard to say. You don’t hear the term postmodernism much anymore, and yet, nothing has really taken its place. Frank Gehry is hot, but his flamboyant deconstructions are too idiosyncratic to constitute a contagious style. Most architectural styles have been revivals of one sort or another – neoclassical, Gothic revival, and the like – so, who knows? Perhaps the time is ripe for a “modernist revival.”

At least, that’s the feeling you get encountering not one, but two major shows in New York devoted to the modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: “Mies in Berlin” at the Museum of Modern Art and “Mies in America” at the Whitney. Each covers about 30 years of the architect’s career.

Who was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe? He was born Ludwig Mies in Germany, became famous in the 1920s – mostly for designs that were never built – and headed the Bauhaus school of art and design. He came to the United States at the age of 52, a celebrity in avant-garde circles, and undertook such projects as the Seagram Building in New York, the glass-walled Farnsworth House, and the entire campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He designed the Barcelona chair. He was one of the chief villains in Tom Wolfe’s spoof of modern architecture, “From Bauhaus to Our House.” He was the one who said, “God dwells in the details.” He died in 1969.

Despite having added the aristocratic-sounding Van der Rohe to his name as an up-and-coming architect, he came to be known simply as Mies (pronounced Mees). He is credited with inventing a uniquely 20th century form of architecture, a style of steel beams, concrete slabs, and glass skins. His major artistic decision was to let this new technology speak for itself, to design with nothing but “skin and bones,” to make the building a transparent statement of its own structure, as simple and as elegant – to his way of thinking – as a pyramid or a Greek temple.

In the case of horizontal buildings, the result was a minimalist structure of stone slabs and glass walls. In the case of tall buildings, the result was what is known today as a “glass box.” Depending on your taste, these buildings are either clear and forceful or banal and boring. But, for or against, there’s no denying the universality of the Miesian architectural language. (In America in the Sixties, the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill became so thoroughly identified with the style that the trio was referred to as “Three Blind Mies.”)

One of the reforms of postmodernism was to substitute stone for glass. Stone feels solid, traditional, permanent. Of course, stone buildings today – the tall ones, at least – are really no more solid or old-fashioned than the glass ones. Both are made with the same “curtain-wall” construction. This is the technology that made Mies’ career possible: A steel skeleton supports the building, and can be sheathed in just about anything – glass, granite slabs, metal, even plastic. These materials simply “hang” on the structure, like curtains. Mies preferred glass because it was more honest – it revealed the building’s true nature. This forthright functionality is part of the Bauhaus aesthetic.

“Mies in Berlin” is an architectural coming-of-age story. Earlier exhibits have focused almost exclusively on those projects that foreshadowed his later work, and the Modern has ferreted out a number of early projects that show a much different Mies. As a young architect he designed a number of neoclassical country houses, some of which are positively homey, with steeply pitched shingled roofs and “eyebrow” windows. They even call to mind Frank Lloyd Wright’s early work, which Mies had seen in magazines. Projects such as the Riehl House and the Perls House show a preference for strong, symmetrical facades and a sensitivity to landscape and garden design – foreshadowing, perhaps, the later attempts in his glass-walled structures to unify indoors and outdoors.

One of the main complaints about modern architecture was the way it clashed with, and even seemed to bully, older buildings. You can see the seeds of this in a 1928 photomontage that Mies made, showing his proposal for a never-built bank and office building as it would look in Stuttgart. The image of Mies’ glass-and-steel building has been pasted into an actual photo of the old-worldish square, with its cobblestone street, its rustic stone arches, its Bavarian-style hotel. It looks as out of place as an ocean liner that has crashed up onto the land.

To enliven the exhibit, there are 14 new models of buildings both built and unbuilt, all made to a consistent scale to allow for comparisons. Adding some high-tech excitement are video and digital models, which allow for “virtual walk-throughs.” A digital kiosk allows visitors to click through five issues of G magazine, an influential avant-garde journal that Mies was involved with. Here can be found Mies’ 1922 plan for an all-glass skyscraper, a surprisingly curvaceous, delicate structure as elegant as a nautilus shell.

The show also has 165 photographs by the Dusseldorf-based photographer Thomas Ruff, who has taken pictures of Mies’ buildings and, in some cases, blurred and manipulated them – though it’s not clear why. Between the spiffy (and very expensive) new models and all the high-tech stuff, there’s a sense of something more than just a retrospective. It’s a kind of resurrection, appropriate for an institution whose aesthetic is so closely aligned to his, and which is repository for the enormous Mies archives.

Mies’ masterpiece of the period was the German Pavilion in Barcelona, originally built for the 1929 Exposition. It was torn down in 1930, then rebuilt in 1986 on the original site. This is the best project for seeing the poetry of the international style. The building is a simple information center and rest house, a minimalist composition in marble, fine stone, chromium, glass, water, and sculpture. The precise attention to surfaces and materials is reminiscent of Japanese teahouse and garden design. The distinction between inside and outside space is intentionally blurred. A visitor to the building is led through a succession of areas that vary in their degree of enclosure, sometimes open on several sides, sometimes closed by two, three, or four walls. It is furnished with the famed Barcelona chairs, those metal-legged, armless seats of two simple, leather-covered slabs – which you can sit in at the show.

It wasn’t until he came to the United States that Mies got to build an actual glass-walled house, the famous Farnsworth House of Plano, Ill. (1945-51), featured in the Whitney show. The photographs of this glass house on stilts (it is built in a flood plain) show it to be stark, spare, with a wonderful simplicity of structure. Yet it looks entirely unlivable. And this, of course, is one of the problems with modernism when carried to such extremes. Can a house such as this, that may have wonderful abstract qualities but be so impractical to live in, really be considered good design?

Doubts about Mies’ absolutist tendencies also are aroused when we see his design for the Illinois Institute of Technology. All the buildings are glass and steel boxes that give no hint as to their different functions. No features distinguish the chapel from the power plant or the main classroom.

As at the Modern, the Whitney show is a blend of scholarliness and theater. We go from squinting at the kinds of technical blueprints that only an architect would appreciate, to being immersed in New Age music and time-lapse photography that captures the way the light rakes across one of Mies’ glass lobbies in the course of a day. As with all architecture exhibits, the true subject – the buildings themselves – is missing. Those who want to see the real thing should walk down to 53rd Street and Park Avenue and take a look at the Seagram Building (1956-58), Mies’ acknowledged skyscraper masterpiece. That’s also a good spot for contemplating its legacy, surrounded as it is by such massive glass towers as the Citicorp Building, the new First Boston Building, and the Park Avenue Plaza Building.

The Seagram Building is praised for its purity and elegant proportion. To get an idea of what a carefully balanced composition it is, try to imagine the building without the open plaza in front of it (the building occupies little more than half its site), or sitting flush on the ground instead of up on piers. In comparison, the Fortune 500 boxes around it look overscaled and bloated.

If the differences seem subtle, then recall Mies’ dictum, the one about God being in “the details.”

Museum of Modern Art

2001