Mies at Home

From Am Karlsbad 24 to the Tugendhat House

Xiangnan Xiong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000600827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Mies at Home is a radical rereading of one of the most significant periods in Mies van der Rohe's career, from the mid- to late 1920s when he was developing his seminal spatial ideas— ideas that would culminate in his celebrated design of the Tugendhat House.

The book examines how Mies's experience of residing in his apartment, doubling as a studio, in central Berlin had an impact on his spatial concepts. It uncovers one of the most profound but virtually untold aspects of Mies's development: how his visions of an ideal lifestyle came out of his own living experience and how they, in turn, informed his domestic architecture. Mies's quest featured two breakthroughs. In the Weissenhof apartment building, he conveyed a flexible and manifold lifestyle that many of the avant-garde artists, including himself, were practicing. Later, in the Tugendhat House, he put forward an alternative way of living that centered on contemplation.

Beautifully illustrated throughout, Mies at Home offers a fresh investigation of the diverse intentions and strategies the architect used in creating his iconic open spaces. It will be an insightful read for researchers, academics, and students in architectural history and theory.

Part I
The World Mies Inhabited

1 Mies’s Writings in the 1920sA Transitional Moment

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036715-3

The long decade—from the end of World War I to 1930—marked a crucial period in Mies van der Rohe’s career. His practice transformed radically. Before the war, he had only completed a handful of neoclassical country houses in a suburb of Berlin. During the early 1920s, he worked on five visionary building projects that brought him to the forefront of the development of modernist architecture, and, toward the end of the decade, he completed the canonical Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House, which secured his position as a master of modernist architecture.

Mies’s breakthrough was a result of a fundamental change of architectural approach. He once related in retrospection that he underwent a “spiritual crisis” right after World War I, worrying about what architectural principles to follow.¹ He spent a decade searching for an answer, and his writings of this period attested it. They mostly revolved around some of the key questions concerning the orientation of his architectural creation, including what drove architecture fundamentally, how buildings could restore humanistic values against the prevailing technological threat, and how spaces could be made to facilitate an inner life. Collectively, Mies’s writings of the 1920s convey a sea change in his architectural thoughts: he restructured his value system and shifted the driving force of his work from new technologies to modern life.

Mies’s transformation of architectural thoughts, though as revolutionary and complicated as the reorientation of his work, has received far less scholarly attention. Mies wrote little and mostly at an abstract level; most scholars have therefore treated these writings as supplements to his building practices rather than a subject worth studying closely in its own right. Fritz Neumeyer is an exception; he keenly detected Mies’s shifts of position in 1926. Built upon this essential observation, I expand the focus a little to examine the larger arc of Mies’s transition throughout the decade, with an emphasis on its central issue—the interrelationships between life, architecture, and technology.² Detlef Mertins, in his weighty monograph Mies, has also noted Mies’s growing interest in modern life in the 1920s, but he dispersed this insight through several chapters and therefore failed to consolidate a coherent argument. My work attempts to amend this.

Mies’s transition was a consequence of over a decade of reflections about the core task of architecture and its vital driving forces. Throughout the period, he read widely and socialized extensively. His thinking was nourished and complicated by a veritable flood of new artistic, philosophical, and sociological thoughts that distinguished the cultural milieu of Berlin in the 1920s. The key period of his transition began around the middle of 1924 and concluded in 1926.

Mies’s Writing: Habit and Style

Throughout his life, Mies wrote little. He was never fond of writing, nor was he really adept at the craft. When he needed to communicate an idea, he preferred to draw. His attitude was best expressed in reply to an editorial request for lengthening his essay: “because I am no writer, I find writing difficult; in the same time, I could have completed a new design.”³

But, relatively speaking, Mies wrote more in the 1920s than in any other period of his life. He composed articles and drafted lectures. They discussed his recent projects, or, at times, served as positional papers prescribing what he believed to be the right path to architecture. His lectures usually centered on a determined theme with a pointed argument. His writings were mostly short and condensed, seeking to achieve clarity with minimal means, very much like his buildings.

Mies read avidly, and his reading notes constituted a critical source of his writings. Up to the time he left Germany, he owned over three thousand books, which represented a broad cross section of the contemporary art and intellectual world. His library covered a wide range of subjects and authors, including works by philosopher Romano Guardini, sociologists Georg Simmel and Max Scheler, art historians Heinrich Wölfflin and Julius Meier-Graefe, botanist Raoul Heinrich Francé, among many others.⁴ He read them carefully and took notes. Mies once described his reading habit:

When I read, I usually read the same text a few times and make notes. I read so intensely that I no longer recall how the notes I made came about because I am so very concerned with the meaning of it all.⁵

In taking notes, Mies was trying to digest the idea, condense it into the very essence, and, eventually, assimilate it into his own system.

A good portion of Mies’s library was authored by his acquaintances. It was likely that he had known of the major ideas of these books before acquiring them. Mies’s early connections with Berlin’s elite intellectuals were facilitated primarily through Alois Riehl, a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin and Mies’s first client. Mies built a country house for him in Neubabelsberg, a new suburb of Potsdam in 1907. It was at Riehl’s house that Mies first met philosopher Eduard Spranger and classicist Werner Jaeger; both were then Riehl’s students. They visited the Riehl House on various occasions and often spent evenings there discussing philosophy, a special event referred to as “philosophy night.” Mies was a welcome guest. Given his then growing interest in philosophy, he must have often sat in during the “philosophy night” and listened enthusiastically. It was also at a party held at the Riehl House that Mies first met Ada Bruhn, a daughter of a wealthy industrialist and who would later become his wife. Bruhn had been engaged to Heinrich Wölfflin, a leading art historian of his generation and Riehl’s colleague at the university, whom Mies probably also met at the Riehl House.⁶

In a way, the Riehl House served as an intellectual nucleus for Mies, providing him, a previously little-educated young man from a mason’s family, an opportunity to meet some of the most brilliant thinkers in Berlin and to hear them discussing their ideas. Mies would acquire their works afterwards and study them closely. Undoubtedly, his library contained books by Riehl, Spranger, Jaeger, and Wölfflin—those whom he had met at the Riehl House. In an interview later in his life, Mies talked about the impact of this experience concisely: “There [at the Riehl House] I met quite a number of people, and I started to read more and more.”⁷

In addition to the social occasions at the Riehl House, Mies mingled extensively with various intellectual circles. In doing so, he got to know some of the most brilliant minds in Germany at the time and followed new developments in social science and the humanities. He attended lectures on various subjects and took notes when he heard something useful. He was passionate and yet selective. He once agreed to a plea to give a lecture on the new architecture only after he found that philosophers Romano Guardini and Nicolai Hartmann would each present a lecture in the same series.⁸ He presumably attended their lectures, and undoubtedly his library contained works by both.

Mies’s self-educational experience represents an inspiring and effective pattern: he followed ideas of the key intellectuals of his time, acquired their works, and read them carefully. He took notes of what he considered sparkling ideas, reflected on how they were related to his world and, eventually, what they meant for architecture.⁹

In addition to groups of scholars, Mies was admitted into the major avant-garde artist circles in Berlin and soon got to know all the critical figures. It was a surprisingly small world, where everyone knew everyone. He joined various artistic associations, became acquainted with their members, and emerged, at least for a time, to be a central figure in these groups. He joined the Novembergruppe (the November Group) in 1922, soon became head of its architectural section, and, later, its president. He joined the Deutscher Werkbund in 1924, was appointed as its vice president the next year and supervised the 1927 Weissenhof housing exhibition, which was the most important Werkbund project after the war. In 1926, Mies and German architect Hugo Häring founded Der Ring, an avant-garde architect association in Berlin. By the middle of the 1920s, Mies was associated with the most important organizations of artists and architects in the German modernist movement. Through his involvement in various avant-gardist circles, he came into contact with the leading figures in De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, and avant-garde film, and was well informed of each group’s artistic propositions.

Yet, in bonding with avant-garde artists and other key thinkers of the time, Mies found himself standing in a flood of extraordinary notions that not only provided him with rich intellectual stimulation, but also pushed him to formulate his own ideas and articulate them forcefully. This explained to a large extent why he wrote more in the 1920s. Through writing, Mies not only sought to convey his ideas to the audience, but also, more importantly, to clarify them for himself.

So, Mies wrote discreetly, reflecting, back and forth, on certain ideas and weighing his words with great precision. Most of his writings of the 1920s, including journal essays, speech drafts, or even letter drafts, show multiple revisions. He was obviously chary about what he said, trying to condense them and to be as accurate as possible at the same time.¹⁰ As a result, he was notoriously slow and unproductive in his writing.¹¹ He remained this way throughout his entire life, more so as he aged, editing even routine letters repetitively and shortening his texts before they were—sometimes—entirely deleted.¹² This, however, makes what he wrote carry all the more weight since every single word he wrote came from deep, deliberate contemplation.

Mies was rather selective in accepting writing commissions. He declined or remained unresponsive to requests that did not interest him. For example, Hans Prinzhorn, a celebrated psychiatrist and a friend, who at Mies’s request had once written for the G journal, asked Mies to return the favor by contributing an essay for his encyclopedic series Das Weltbild: Bücherei lebendigen Wissen.¹³ He sent many letters urging Mies to write, but they had little effect. Mies simply ignored them. Also disregarded was Walter Gropius’s request for an essay for a volume of the Bauhausbücher series. Despite that, Mies voluntarily wrote for various purposes, discussing his work, stating his architectural positions, reviewing books, preparing for speeches, and so forth. In total, he wrote notably more in the 1920s than at any other time in his career.

In the 1920s, Mies wrote not only more frequently but also almost continuously. This thus offers us a rare opportunity to follow his train of thought and trace the development of his architectural ideas more closely. If we put these writings together and read them in chronological order, we will find that they manifest a remarkable turnabout in his architectural thinking. It began to emerge in the middle of 1924, at a time when Mies was moving his focus away from modern technology to modern life.

Mies’s Transition: Writings from 1924 to 1926

Mies’s writing of the 1920s as a whole featured a shift of interest: the core of his thinking moved away from new technologies to the problem of modern life. This radical change in architectural rationale complicated and implicitly challenged the standard assessment that Mies’s major contribution to modernist architecture resided in his exquisite expression of modern technology. Mies’s writings toward the end of the 1920s made it explicit that transfiguring new technologies was not his central pursuit but rather its necessary by-product.

Before the middle of 1924, admittedly, much of Mies’s writing centers on new building technologies and their implications for architecture. He used his skyscraper projects to illustrate the formal potential of glass curtain walls: to expose the bold building structure and create rich effects of light.¹⁴ He discussed the merits and shortcomings of new materials and prescribed their best usage. He noted that ferroconcrete saved material but had poor insulating and soundproofing qualities, so when using it, one needed to provide additional insulation or find ways to exclude external sources of noise.¹⁵ Similarly, he explained how to obtain a spatial span of sixteen meters with only two internal columns, claiming that it was the most efficient way to build with concrete.¹⁶ His writing was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction: Domesticating Mies
• PART I The World Mies Inhabited
• PART II The World Mies Created
• Selected Bibliography
• Index