Mies and his Teaching Venues. The Triumph of Architecture over Function (original) (raw)
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Mies van der rohe. The Architecture of the City. Theory and Architecture, 2022
Mies van der Rohe’s teaching is an inseparable dimension of his way of understanding architecture. The classrooms offered him the possibility to further explore his concerns, to try out new solutions, and to reflect without the constraints of the professional commission. For this reason, investigating his architecture from the perspective of his almost 30 years as a teacher confers new perspectives and opens the debate towards new questions that demand answers.
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.
Mies's Convention Hall: Convergence of Teaching and Architecture
Cuadernos de Proyectos Arquitectónicos, 2019
In mid-November 1953, the Chicago Tribune published an article on Mies van der Rohe's proposal for the city's new convention center. The following month, Engineering News-Record magazine gave more details on the project, pointing out that Mies had taken Frank Kornacker on board as structural engineer. As his student Peter Carter writes in his book Mies van der Rohe at Work, Mies worked on the project both in his office and with a group of graduate students in his master classes at IIT. Carter quotes lines that appear in the written report of the thesis presented by the three students. Thus, the Convention Hall project was also formalized in a thesis submitted by Yujiro Miwa, Henry Kanazawa, and Pao-Chi Chang in June 1954. However, many biographies and publications dealing with Mies's work ignores the role played by the students and the structural engineer in its development, and their accounts are sometimes confused. The main objective of this research is to bring to lig...
Mies van der Rohe and the progressive side of architecture
If progress in architecture corresponds to the posing of new questions, one of the main aspects of the work of Mies van der Rohe has been in fact to put in crisis and to be measured with the historical architecture and his elements. By this point of view, he was a forerunner that paved the way and offered inspirational perspectives, which have been able to trigger wide experimentation for the generations of architects to come. The solutions, for example, Mies' projects offered for the corner of the IIT Navy Building and for the lesser-known rear loggia piers in the project of Mosler house, represent his effort to master the solution Schinkel elaborated for the corners of Altes Museum and to redraw it in progressive terms and for the present city. This paper concerns the analysis of the theme of the corner solution, as it was elaborated by several architects (Behrens, Perret, Grassi). In this way, the aim is to draw attention to how the same theme has brought to different solutions, to a progressive consideration of the architectural elements and their relationship with the history and architecture of each city.
Training architecture through mies’ houses: the lemke house in berlin
Mies Van Der Rohe .The architecture of the city. Theory and Architecture, 2022
The opportunity to analyze the construction, renovated in 2002, under a typo- logical, historical and technological point of view, through a still-life metric survey and subsequent redesign8, has made it possible to verify the validity of these principles within the extraordinary simplicity of the building. In particular, the relationship be- tween openings and structure, previously investigated by Mies as a problem of over- coming the “constructive truth” (think of the Krefeld villas), here becomes a twofold interpretation of the wall as a semperian “mauer” and “wand” at the same time: the openings are proportional to the construction’s modules but are always developed as horizontal strips with a need to be held by a “modern” steel lintel9. On the other hand, the internal spaces follow a rigorous relationship with the study of visuals and proportions, as well as with the building location on the site, clearly revealing a classical interpretative approach never compromised by the use of modern constructive devices.
"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.
Daring the Uncertain: Spaces of learning within the architectural education
2015
The main concern of this paper is knowledge production within the architectural education – how spatial constructs representing and constituting society may catalyze critical making and thinking. Starting from the proposition that the discourse of architectural history involves transformative experiences, I turn to theories of learning and performativity in order to suggest how transformations happening through architecture may be possible to direct and evaluate within educational systems. I discuss possibilities of history by referring to Nancy Stieber, Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, the notion of learning through ideas from Gilles Deleuze, Peter Sloterdijk, Ray Land and Jan H.F. Meyer, and the performance as a spatial event by turning to Erika Fischer-Lichte. I hope this paper contributes to that the efficiency hailed within educational systems today is imbued by ambiguity, and that – in effect – the ability of those systems to address perplexing aspects of the society we live in, is enhanced.
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.
This paper focuses on the analysis of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s curriculum at the Department of Architecture of the Armour Institute of Technology, which would be renamed Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and László Moholy-Nagy’s curriculum at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Special attention is paid to the teaching of the “Visual Training” course at the Armour Institute of Technology, which had some affinities with the “Preliminary Course” (Vorkurs) of the Bauhaus and was taught by Walter Peterhans, a Bauhäusler invited by Mies to join the Armour Institute of Technology, and served “to train the eye and sense of design and to foster aesthetic appreciation in the world of proportions, forms, colors, textures and spaces”. Mies prioritized “Visual training” over freehand drawing. For him, visual training was “indispensable as a means of recording an idea”, and drawing was to be understood as “a means of fostering insight and stimulating ideas”. Mies’s “Program for Architectural Education” was founded on his belief that students should be confronted, during their very first year, with the awareness that technique and ideas are interlinked. For this reason, he encouraged students to use drawings as a means of seeing. The overarching curriculum moved from “Means” to “Purposes” to “Planning and Creating”. Among the most discussed features of Bauhaus pedagogy is the Preliminary Course, the so-called Vorkurs. The way László Moholy-Nagy, director of the New Bauhaus founded in 1937, incorporated certain aspects of the Vorkurs in his curriculum, and especially in the Preliminary Course, at the New Bauhaus maintained the binary relationship between technology and aesthetics characterising Bauhaus pedagogy: that between Werkmeister and Formmeister. However, Moly-Nagy replaced this binary relationship by a more complex tripartite system organised around art, science and technology. Moly-Nagy believed that a new individuality was a prerequisite condition for a new society and his pedagogy was based on an ensemble of concepts drawn from Goethe’s understanding of epistemology and John Dewey’s pragmatism. One of the main objectives of this paper is to show that Moly-Nagy’s pedagogical and epistemological vision was based on an effort to reconcile humanistic anti-materialism, and a perception of experience as a set of situations linked to Dewey’s conception of education.
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.