Mies van der Rohe and the progressive side of architecture (original) (raw)
Related papers
"Zur Neuen Welt" – Towards the New World. Ludwig Mies and his Architectural Youth in Aachen.
Docomomo Journal No. 56, 2017
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's personal and professional connections to his hometown Aachen in Germany are mostly unknown today. Through the analysis of both old and new written and graphic sources, the authors give an insight into Mies van der Rohe's lifelong bond to his hometown. In the personal friendships, his friends Ferdinand Goebbels and Franz Dominick play a key role. Furthermore, the paper presents previously unknown buildings that young Mies was working on in the office of Albert Schneiders around 1905. One of the buildings, the house “Zur Neuen Welt” for client Joseph Oeben, is still standing and represents a lively example of the stylistic search in architecture after the turn of the millennium, and an early step towards Mies van der Rohe's architectural maturity.
THE MUSEUM IN THE EDUCATIONAL ARCHITECTURE OF MIES VAN DER ROHE: THE FESTIVAL OF ART
BAc Boletín Académico Revista de investigación y arquitectura contemporánea, 2019
Mies van der Rohe explored the museum project both as an architect and as a teacher, and contributed towards a new way of understanding its meaning: a space for the enjoyment of art. Although critics have already published articles about the museums that Mies created in his office, and analysed them in detail, nothing is known about the academic research he carried out on this type of building. For this reason, the purpose of this article is: to present the museum-projects that Mies supervised on the graduate programme at the IIT -specifically the final master’s theses of Daniel Brenner, Jean Lippert and Peter Carter; to carry out a comparative study of these theses, based on the concepts that Mies himself expressed in the text of the Museum for a Small City; and to explore the constant aspects that are maintained in these spaces destined for the festival of art, establishing connections between the architecture of the Mies, and that of his students.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Architecture's Spatial Distraction
Architecture Through Drawing, 2019
An architect’s design sketches are rarely questioned for their implementation of technical drawing conventions commonly used in the profession. However, these sketches are most often characterised in some way by perspective, axonometry or orthography. These techniques define certain ways of thinking about architecture. This essay will examine the importance of drawing technique on the development of design ideas in the sketch. Through an investigation of a single sketch, one by Mies van der Rohe, titled ‘Hofhauser’ (Court Houses) completed in c. 1935 it questions the purpose of framing architectural ideas through perspectival techniques. What these techniques offer is the capacity for the sketch to reinforce architecture’s ordered regularity, an attribute that for Mies supported a specific notion of spatial and material value. In his sketch, perspectival conventions equally reflect a desire initially for this value to be recognised by the viewer as imbued with moral inferences and as a consequence, the expectation of this precondition within potential dwellers of his architecture.
Teka Komisji Urbanistyki i Architektury Oddziału PAN w Krakowie, nr 50, s. 357-379, 2022
A collection of nine letters from the Catholic theologian Romano Guardini to his friend Fr. Josef Weiger was published in 1927. In Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's library of several hundred items, it was a book that he used to formulate the basic principles of his own architecture. The aim of the paper is to present the content of Guardini's book and its influence on the views and work of Mies van der Rohe. The architect's insightful monographs, especially the book by Fritz Neumeyer, accurately document the relationship between the theologian's statements and attempts to adapt them to the theory of architecture. The more recent analysis of these relationships presented in the article leads to the conclusion that Mies van der Rohe set himself the task of finding a pure spirit in the world of pure abstractions. His creative involvement was a form of contemplating and developing forces which, although contained in nature or technology, can also be considered transcendent.
I castelli di Yale online, 2020
Following the principle of contamination of the arts, this text explores the artistic affinity between the work of Mies van der Rohe and that of Kandinskij and Ejzenstejn. The three masters, in their respective fields of expression, have investigated the different conceptions of space, coming to surprisingly similar conclusions. In support of this thesis, a universally recognized masterpiece of the Miesian production is analyzed here: the German Pavilion created for the International Exhibition in Barcelona (1929). The two volumes Punto, linea e superifice and Lezioni di regia , constitute the framework through which the reasoning is here developed.
The paper focuses on the relationship between zeitwille, which expresses simultaneously a Schopenhauerian “will of the age” and a “will of time”, and impersonality in Mies van der Rohe’s thought. Paying special attention to “Baukunst und Zeitwille” (1924), it sheds light on the phenomenon of the inhabitants distancing from the chaos of the city, a particular effect of Mies’s interiors, associating it with his belief in the autonomous individual and his conviction that in “town and city living […] privacy is a very important requirement”. In “The Preconditions of Architectural Work” (1928), Mies claimed that “[t]he act of the autonomous individual becomes ever more important”. The ambiguity of Mies’s simultaneous interest in impersonality and the autonomous individual is pivotal for understanding the tension between the universality and individuality in his thought. Mies favoured the acts of the autonomous individual, while rejecting the endeavour to “express individuality in architecture”, as it becomes evident when he affirms that “[t]o try to express individuality in architecture is a complete misunderstanding of the problem”. The distinction he drew between individuality and the autonomous individual is crucial for comprehending how he related großstadt to zeitwille. The strategies he employed in his representations - either his photomontages for the Berlin skyscraper projects in the 1920s such as his entry to the Friedrichstrasse skyscraper competition or the interior linear perspective views of the late 1930s such as his competition entry for a Museum for a Small City - serve for elucidating Mies’s very conception of the relationship between großstad tand zeitwille. As Manfredo Tafuri claims, in “Theatre as a Virtual City: From Appia to the Totaltheater” (1977), the stagelike experience in Mies’s interiors is related to a specific attitude of the inhabitant towards the metropolis. Tafuri associates the sensation of “the impossibility of restoring ‘syntheses’” with a specific kind of “negativeness” towards metropolis, which brings to mind what Georg Simmel called “blasé attitude”. The “positive and essential” “negation” to which Mies referred in a letter he wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1947 is examined in relation to this “negativeness” towards metropolis highlighted by Tafuri. His interiors and their representations enhance the identification of the inhabitants with autonomous individuals, aiming to overcome the tension characterising modern metropolis between the frenetic city and the private bourgeois dwelling. They could be perceived as fragments of the metropolis indoors. Blending perspective and photomontage, Mies’s representations intensify the sensation of leaving behind the chaos of the metropolis.
Objetivity and Form. Mies and the Concrete Office Building
REVISTA EN BLANCO. ESPACIOS PARA LA DESPEDIDA, 2022
The Office Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1923, appears to be a simple prism built with just two materials: concrete and glass. In this project, and for the first time, Mies conceived a structural system to which he assigned aesthetic qualities, without sacrificing clarity and objectivity, by spiritualizing tectonic processes; in this way, he designed a building that is characterized by the lightness and subtle dynamism of its composition. A series of concrete platforms appear to float freely, one above the other, thanks to a carefully designed structure using transparent glass. The aim of this article is, therefore, to contribute to the knowledge of one of the five projects that make up Mies van der Rohe’s manifestos for a new architecture. The evaluation of the structure as an architectural form, the relationship between the design of the building section and the transparency of the glass, as well as the problem of access to the building and its representation, are addressed in the text. To contribute to a better understanding of this project, original documents are analyzed, and a new graphic reconstruction of the building’s floor plan is provided.
Architecture and Culture, 2021
The article explores the relationship between Baukunst and Zeitwille in the practice and pedagogy of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the significance of the notions of civilization and culture for his philosophy of education and design practice. Focusing on the negation of metropolitan life and mise en scene of architectural space as its starting point, it examines how Georg Simmel’s notion of objectivity could be related to Mies’s understanding of civilization. Its key insight is to recognize that Mie’s practice and pedagogy was directed by the idea that architecture should capture the driving force of civilization. The paper also summarizes the foundational concepts of Mies’s curriculum in Chicago. It aims to highlight the importance of the notions of Zeitwille and impersonality in Mies van der Rohe’s thought and to tease apart the tension between the impersonality and the role of the autonomous individual during the modernist era.