Fifteen years ago, the centenary of the birth of Mies van der Rohe coincided with a period of singular postmodern fervor, and that untimely simultaneity projected an uncertain light upon the anniversary. Even the Museum of Modern Art, which keeps the
One of the most beautiful descriptions ever written about Mies’s personality is perhaps found in the first lines of the text that Peter Blake wrote in 1960, with the title: ‘Mies van der Rohe, the master of structure’. “On almost any day of the week,
This is a Mies for minors; simplified and purged of tricky fragments, as the watereddown classics read by the Dolphin of France. Simplified, because the long creative career of Mies van der Rohe is summed up in 60 works taquigraphically described and
When in 1905 Ludwig Mies left his native Aachen for Berlin, he was nineteen years old and possessed already a good practical knowledge of materials and traditional construction techniques, an eye and hand admirably trained for drawing, and an unusual
The strong winds of the Great War demolished the structure of the ancien régime, and with it, both the old intellectual certainties and the traditional aesthetic norms. After the trauma of war, many architects – particularly in the defeated Germany –
In 1925 Hitler published Mein Kampf, and the menacing rise of Nazism – struggling both with the conservative right and with the supporters of the Bolshevik revolution – is the backdrop of the first modern works of a politically accommodating Mies, wh
Exhibitions foster experiment, and in a brilliant sequence of realizations Mies gave birth to a new idea of space, which flows between the freestanding walls and columns resulting from the innovative separation of enclosure and structure. From the Gl
The five urban competitions of 1928-33 develop the theoretical principles of the Concrete Office Building of 1923, show the side of Mies’s work closest to the rational Sachlichkeit, and prefigure the abstract universality of the American period. If i
The last years of Mies in Germany are associated to the court-house, an adaptation of the fluid space of the suburban houses tomore compact developments, but also ametaphor of isolation from a political climate hostile tomodernity. Keeping the struct
Mies moves to the United States in 1938 without speaking English, and without knowing the language of American construction either. But during his first decade in Chicago this taciturn German develops the vocabulary and syntax of a vernacular industr
The development of the syntax of steel, glass and brick at the IIT campus to create the vernacular language of American construction did not drive Mies away from his European investigations about universal space, that in the new continent could benef
If we generally use the term ‘Chicago School’ to refer to the builders of skyscrapers of the last decades of the 19th century – William Le Baron Jenny, Louis Sullivan or John Wellborn Root –, the great works by Mies and his disciples during the fifti
While in the Herbert Greenwald projects he worked in the demanding context of real estate development, Mies continued teaching and building within the academic environment of the Illinois Insitute of Technology. Always with the help of his old German
The last beats of Mies’s career would have their most precious moments in the universal space projects, those that the critique groups under the clear-span heading and which according to some of his collaborators were also the favorite ones of the ar
It is probable that Mies should have wanted to close his creative career with clear-span buildings, his most civic constructions, in which the community meets and acknowledges it self at the same time; however, his most ecumenical heritage would be t
Mies’s architecture is synonymous with modernism and modernism is synonymous with glass. Glass is also commonly associated with the presumed rationalism of modern architecture. Yet the mythic trajectory of glass follows a more oblique route than the
A skyscraper inscribes its geometric outline into the night sky of the metropolis. Its facade is punctuated by the rectangular openings of its tiers of windows, while its base plunges down into a checkerboard of streets lit by the beams of automobile
The conventional image of Mies in America as the architect of mullioned high-rise and clear-span steel-frame structures portrays him as a creative genius sprung fully formed into the world as the magisterial designer of new building types. However, t
The museum of Modern Art played a near exclusive role in shaping popular and critical understanding of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture for sixty years, from the 1932 “International Style” exhibition to the 1986 posthumous retrospective honoring the
Berlin / ChicagoLuis Fernández-Galiano
Mies es más
Mies is More
Doce capítulos
Twelve Chapters
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Mies ‘ad usum Delphini’: 60 años en 60 obras60 Years in 60 Works
Berlin 1907-1937
Movimientos de apertura: el clasicismo del Berlín guillermino
Opening Movements: the Classicism of Wilhelmine Berlin
Los proyectos teóricos: formas para después de una guerra
The Theoretical Projects: Forms for the Postwar Years
Maclas modernas: la efervescencia experimental de Weimar
Modern Assemblages: the Experimental Effervescence of Weimar
El espacio liberado: exponiendo un espíritu nuevo
The Space in Freedom: Exhibiting a New Spirit
Concursos metropolitanos: el laboratorio alemán de lo universal
Metropolitan Competitions: the German Laboratory of the Universal
El refugio doméstico: tapias ante la tormenta del III Reich
The Domestic Shelter: Walls against the Storm of the Third Reich
Chicago 1939-1969
Gramáticas pedagógicas: el acero como idioma americano
Pedagogical Grammars: Steel as the American Language
Las ideas germinales: estructuras para la transparencia
The Germinal Ideas: Structures for Transparency
Alturas residenciales: la segunda Escuela de Chicago
Residential Heights: the Second Chicago School
El orden industrial: construcción, democracia y monumento
The Industrial Order: Construction, Democracy and Monument
Luz, más luz: los templos tardíos de la técnica
Light, More Light: the Late Temples of Technique
El rascacielos urbano: prismas impasibles y obras imposibles
The Urban Skyscraper: Impassive Prisms and Impossible Works
Cuatro secciones
Four Sections
Rosemarie Haag Bletter
Mies y la transparencia oscura
Mies and Dark Transparency
Jean-Louis Cohen
Anhelos alemanes de América: las visiones urbanas de Mies
German Desires of America: Mies’s Urban Visions
Phyllis Lambert
Inmersión en Mies: la etapa americana
Mies Immersion: the American Period
Terence Riley
Hacer historia: Mies y el Museo de Arte Moderno
Making History: Mies and the Museum of Modern Art
Ignasi de Solà-Morales
Claves biográficas de la obra
Biographical Keys of the Work
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Fifteen years ago, the centenary of the birth of Mies van der Rohe coincided with a period of singular postmodern fervor, and that untimely simultaneity projected an uncertain light upon the anniversary. Even the Museum of Modern Art, which keeps the architect’s archives, offered no more than an obliged apathetic exhibition, and many of the excellent studies arisen to mark this anniversary focused on the shadows of his biography and the sharp edges of his work. The early monograph published by this magazine on the occasion of the event (AV6, 1986) – with the collaboration, among others, of the architectural historians and critics Martin Filler, Kenneth Frampton, Charles Jencks, Julius Posener and Franz Schulze –, echoed the unpleasant climate of the times, described stenographically in the title of one of my texts in that very issue: ‘Mies is Less: a Revisionist Centenary’.
Fifteen years later the mood has changed, and the two great New York exhibitions in the summer of 2001 bear witness to a new attitude toward the modern master. This monograph of AV relies on the research efforts that have crystallized in the two exhibitions – ‘Mies in Berlin’, organized by the MoMA; and ‘Mies in America’, organized by the Whitney Museum and the Centre Canadien d'Architecture –, and in fact its argumental core is formed by four articles from the catalogs of the respective exhibitions, written by the German-born New York professor Rosemarie Haag Bletter, the French historian and ex-director of the CCA Jean-Louis Cohen, the MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and organizer (with Barry Bergdoll) of the Berlinese exhibition, Terence Riley, and the Canadian philantropist, founding director of the CCA and also curator of the American exhibit, Phyllis Lambert.
These texts offer inedit perspectives both about the European stretch of Mies’s career and of his years in Chicago, and shed light on the vicissitudes that his critical appraisal has experienced after Philip Johnson set up in 1947 the first monographic exhibition devoted to his work. With the aim of fitting these approaches within a pedagogical frame, the articles by researchers are introduced with a summary of the master’s career whose 60 years of creative life are reflected in 60 works that try to show the essential lines of his architectural inquiries. Lastly, the number closes with a portrait of Mies that Ignasi de Solá-Morales wrote for the 1986 monograph, which we would end up replacing by another piece of his on modern representation, and that we publish now as a posthumous tribute to the Catalan architect and historian: few events have been so decisive as his philological reconstruction of the Barcelona pavilion to promote the current state of opinion that makes possible the title ‘Mies is More’.
The digital viewer from Arquitectura Viva gives you a new experience browsing our publications in a simpler and agile way in all your devices
Try now
