The brick in country houses went back to Georgian architecture in eighteenth-century England, but in that instance the desire was to minimize the rawness of the material and encase it in ornament. Mies’s brick country house is the opposite. It is simply a sequence of freestanding brick walls, of various heights and lengths and thicknesses, some of them meeting at T-junctions, others joined at right-angled corners. With no doors, it is one continuous flowing space. Full of surprises, with a concentration on the human experience, the conglomerate alternates nooks and crannies with larger spaces. It accommodates the human need for both coziness and generosity of scale. It and the concrete country house, with their exquisitely refined designs based on ordinary materials, presented a new notion of a suitable shell for human existence. With their open plans, they would have lasting influence on domestic architecture worldwide.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, brick country house project, 1924. In elevation and plan, his brick country house had rhythmic interlocking forms and extraordinary spatial flow.
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While Mies was making these groundbreaking designs, one of the hottest topics in Berlin was the Bauhaus. But for Mies, there was the Gropius problem. The stonecutter’s son from Aachen had not gotten over the way the former hussar had made him feel when they were both in Behrens’s office.
Mies’s antipathy to Gropius had grown all the stronger at the start of 1919, when Mies submitted his Kröller-Müller design to an exhibition Gropius was organizing that was to open at the end of March. Gropius’s show, which had the catchy title “Exhibition of Unknown Architects,” was to be the first exhibition of architecture following the armistice. Nearly fifty years later, Mies would still recall Gropius’s response to his submission, as if it had been said only the day before: “We can’t exhibit it; we are looking for something entirely different.”11
In 1921, Theo van Doesburg, a friend of Mies’s who was the leader of the Dutch de Stijl movement and one of the founders of G, had gone to Weimar in hopes of being hired to teach at the Bauhaus. When Gropius failed to appoint him, he stayed in the new German capital anyway, and taught privately. Meanwhile, Mies’s friend Werner Graeff, who at age nineteen had become a Bauhaus student, was making remarkable graphite and tempera drawings in Itten’s course—they look like a combination of Zen calligraphy and the paintings Franz Kline would make in America thirty years later—but Itten did not approve of his approach. Graeff left the school unhappily and studied with Van Doesburg instead. Hans Richter was also among Van Doesburg’s group of Bauhaus outsiders, and even if Mies did not subscribe to Richter’s political agenda, he considered the former dadaist a colleague. In the period when Van Doesburg was teaching at home in Weimar rather than at the Bauhaus, Mies, Graeff, Richter, and Van Doesburg often communicated about what they considered to be Gropius’s aesthetic fickleness.
Everything changed in 1923, however. That year, Gropius asked Mies to show some of his recent work in the great Bauhaus Exhibition. Mies could not resist the invitation. Models of the glass skyscraper and concrete office building, and a drawing of the concrete country house, went off to Weimar, where they were handsomely installed in the section of the show devoted to international architecture. Given their long if unspoken rivalry, the alliance between Gropius and Mies still felt tentative, but their relationship was improving.
THE PROJECTS MIES actually realized in the early 1920s were not nearly as radical in concept as his skyscrapers and brick and concrete country houses. But the houses he designed for his parents-in-law’s circle of friends had a bit of the spareness and boldness that were his ideal, even as these residences retained enough of a traditional tone so that their owners did not risk being socially ostracized. And a monument Mies built in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde cemetery in honor of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the martyrs to the German Communist party who had been killed in an uprising in 1919, was revolutionary in design in a way appropriate to Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s politics. Composed entirely of coarse bricks, their jagged edges bespeaking unmitigated toughness, this abstract sequence of blocks was like a resonant shout. Adorned with hammer and sickle emblazoned on a five-pointed star, the monument had a stridency that was unmistakable. We know it, however, only from photos; Mies’s brave reminder of Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s courage was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.
While Mies’s client base still consisted mainly of the Bruhns’ friends, he was living as if he were a bachelor. Ada and Dorothea, Marianne, and Waltraut moved around in Switzerland, although the girls would on occasion visit their father in Berlin. Sometimes their mother went along, sometimes the three sisters were on their own. And on his rare holidays, Mies would go to see them, initially in the French-speaking Swiss mountain town of Montana, and after that in the Swiss Engadine.
Then Ada, who loved the mountains but had to give up hiking because she developed a crippling anxiety about heights, finally moved them near Bozen, in the Italian part of the Tyrol. This became their home for long enough for her to undertake psychoanalysis. Her estranged husband had little patience for Freud and his methods, however. Mies himself appeared to avoid introspection; he just kept designing flawless buildings.
He was beginning to command important projects. As vice president of yet another important organization of modern architects and artists, the Deutscher Werkbund, Mies became, in the mid-1920s, artistic director of the Weissenhofsiedlung. This energetic undertaking on the outskirts of Stuttgart was to present the latest in residential architecture. There were to be houses by Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, J. J. P. Oud, and another half dozen or so of the most interesting European architects. Now it became Mies’s turn to do a favor for Gropius. As if in exchange for his own participation in the 1923 Bauhaus show, he not only included his former rival in the list of world-class architects who would create houses for Weissenhof, but gave Gropius one of the best building lots on which to do so. Not that Gropius was elevated to the top; Mies himself and their tough old boss Peter Behrens were doing entire apartment buildings.
This remarkable group of modern residences in a Stuttgart suburb remains to this day a pilgrimage spot for architecture enthusiasts, and Mies’s layout of the array of dwellings is part of the fascination. He had a difficult task; the overall site was narrow, irregular, and full of steep rises and drops. Mies did a spectacular job. He awarded Le Corbusier corner lots so that the Swiss architect’s two stunning villas command the site and announce the thrill of modernism to the approaching visitor. Their glistening white streamlined forms are endowed with lively rhythms and possessed by bravura without arrogance; Mies did well to place them like a signpost. And by locating Le Corbusier where he did, Mies also provided the Swiss with the chance to give the people inside the two villas a sweeping view of vineyards and fields and the distant horizon, fulfilling Le Corbusier’s dream of access to the sky and the forces of the universe.
Besides Gropius, who submitted a prefabricated house, there were other designers whom a lesser person would have excluded as rivals. But Mies showed professionalism and generosity in his approach. He organized the myriad buildings on that difficult spot of land with impressive concord. Their unifying factor was that every house had to be white and have a flat roof; otherwise, the individual designers were given great liberty. The buildings were meant to display both homogeneity and variety.
THE WAY MIES went about the Weissenhof project did not please everyone, however. He was notoriously slow—some would say passive-aggressive—about everything he did. He spent days laboring over the single paragraph he wrote for the exhibition catalogue, greatly irritating the editor. He waited until October 5, 1926, to invite Le Corbusier to participate in this undertaking for which the two villas needed to be completed by July 23 of the following year, which was strangely at odds with the way he then sited them in the premium position. It was Mies’s laboriousness that enabled him to perfect his work, but when its price imposed hardship on everyone in his orbit, there was a lot of displeasure.
Mies’s own work at Weissenhoff had the authority and grandeur that were his alone. His four-story-high apartment house, a long rectangular slab dominating Weissenhof from its highest ridge, is magisterial. Mies had in common with some of his future colleagues at the Bauhaus a wish for his work not only to be effective in fulfilling its purpose, but also to demonstrate an understanding of materials. Yet what was even “more important” to him was for it to have a “spiritual quality.”13 He achieved this through visual tempo and the grace of the proportions.
The west façade of that large building is punctuated by an elegant grid of windows that is, the longer we study it, ever more astonishing. With each vertical rectangle of glass framed in black steel—and with a very subtle and judicious arrangement achieved by using, as an organizational tool, narrow vertical strips of the smooth white plaster—he establishes a precise beat. From left to right, the façade reads three/stop/one. Then there is a full break for the stairwell, followed by one/stop/three/stop/three/stop/four/stop/one. Then there is another stairwell; then comes one/stop/four/stop/three. At that point, following a brief halt, begins the mirror image of what the viewer has just seen.
One is left transfixed by this visual orchestration with its classical beat and tempo. The east façade, which sports balconies and openings for the roof gardens, is equally mesmerizing in its boldness. Klee’s hero was Mozart; Mies’s work conjures Beethoven.
Inside of Mies’s buildings, the apartments look both east and west, so the rooms are flooded with light. That luminosity animates the space so that for all of the balance, Mies’s architecture is always alive with movement. The turns of the stair rails have the grace of flawlessly executed ballet steps, adding further fluidity to the minimalism and inducing the “spiritual” effect Mies desired. As in a Zen rock garden, the visual becomes inexplicably religious.
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While Mies was in Stuttgart working on Weissenhof, he lived in a small apartment with Lilly Reich. Reich, who was, like Ada, one year older than he was, designed textiles and women’s clothing. In 1914, she had run a fashion show put on by the Werkbund; it had been one of the last activities of the avant-garde design group in Berlin before the war ground things to a halt.
Reich’s own appearance conformed to the styles she put into that fashion show. She was always impeccably groomed, in a modern, manly way that was startling to many people, completely counter to the usual style of bourgeois women and the expectations of most men. She assiduously avoided the soft and frilly,14 not only in her appearance but also in her behavior.
While Weissenhof was open to the public, Reich was responsible for a concurrent exhibition in downtown Stuttgart that showed contemporary furniture and household objects. This was where Mies introduced his cantilevered “MR” side chair, a breakthrough in elegant minimalism. The skeleton of the “MR” is a continuous form of tubular steel that is like a drawing made in three-dimensional space. Everything necessary for a chair has been reduced to the bare essentials. The single line of steel establishes the base, legs (of which there are only two, through a feat of equilibrium), seat, and back. Mies calibrated each angle and proportion with utter precision. On the impeccable frame, two expanses of material—either leather or painted caning, depending on the customer’s preference—are stretched tautly to complete the seat and back.
In the history of armchairs, this was among the visually lightest to date. Mies’s sense of line and scale seem to have come from the angels. The curve that creates the base, the seat, and the back is scrolled as if with a magical wand; its opposite number, which further cradles the back, turns for arms, and flows downward until it attaches itself at the perfect point on the legs for effective bracing, completes the exquisite assemblage in a way that guarantees visual pleasure as well as the physical well-being of the sitter. Not only had Mies van der Rohe revolutionized the concept of armchair, but he had transformed the possibilities of matter, making strong substances ethereal.
Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Although he never divorced his wife, who was the mother of his three daughters, Mies lived openly with the opinionated and imperious Lilly Reich, who shared his views on how people should present themselves.
By offering this chair for sale at the pivotal moment when enthusiasts of modern design from all over the world were descending on Stuttgart, Reich proved herself the perfect colleague. She and Mies had the same taste in design, and they both ascribed utmost importance to the presentation of one’s self—in comportment, speaking manner, and appearance. When they continued to live together back in Berlin, they reinforced each other’s stridency on these issues. Mies’s daughters came from the Swiss mountains to visit, and Reich immediately let the girls know in no uncertain terms that the clothing in which their mother had dressed them would not do. While using their mother’s family’s money, to which Mies still had limited access even as its buying power dwindled with inflation, Reich clad them according to her own preference for what was more austere in style and considerably more expensive than anything they had ever owned before.
The girls quickly came to feel as if their father’s mistress was a cold and disapproving stepmother. They were well brought up and polite, but they disliked her intensely. Mies’s reaction was to put even more distance between himself and his children.
To outside observers, the relationship between Mies and Reich depended on her slavish devotion to him. Reich fit in perfectly with the world Mies was designing. Her smart dresses, streamlined hair, and assured speaking manner epitomized rationalism and control while eschewing sentiment. Each of the geniuses at the Bauhaus had a companion who provided vital support, but Mies’s was the only one who offered the flattery of which imitation is said to be the highest form. Everything she did was done in a disciplined, authoritarian way.
IN JULY 1928, Mies van der Rohe was commissioned to design the German Pavilion for a great international exhibition opening in Barcelona. Having forced Le Corbusier to rush his houses for Weissenhof, now he was in the same predicament; the structure needed to be completely ready for the opening of the exhibition by the king and queen of Spain the following May. If it had taken him half a year to write a paragraph, now he had to create and completely construct a major building in ten months.
The result of that breakneck process had rare grace and equipoise. And it had the highest degree of finish imaginable.
The lithe, elegant façade of the Barcelona Pavilion was nothing but a thin rectangular wall of travertine marble blocks aligned so that the graining of the marble achieves a musical flow. A flat white roof was perched lightly on top with an overhang that was like a long continuous eyebrow. Those two forms dominated the structure, yet there was nothing “dominant” here; rather, there was a sense of perfectly related elements juxtaposed in total harmony. The thin and graceful chromed entrance columns, which in cross-section were X-shaped, and the refined half flight of entrance steps incised at a right angle into the sloping terrain, had the same elegance and quiet strength as the marble façade and lithe roof. Inside, Mies had inserted a nonbearing wall between two bearing walls; this breakthrough in building design gave birth to the open plan he had developed but not executed in his country house designs. As Mies explained late in his life, “One evening as I was working late on that b
uilding I made a sketch of a free standing wall, and I got a shock. I knew that it was a new principle.”15
The components, inside and out, were delicately interwoven so that there was a balance of mass and lightness. The furniture was powerful, but it was installed sparely and with ample space around it. White and black, vertical and horizontal: the contrasts played off one another with perfect equilibrium. Yet there was no suggestion whatsoever of an underlying formula; if the system had been visible, it might have diminished the viewer’s response. Rather, the flawless proportions seemed to have grown as naturally as those of a rosebush.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, view of principal façade of German Pavilion, Barcelona, 1928–29. With its unprecedented grace and eloquent use of fine materials, the Barcelona Pavilion was well-known and admired at the Bauhaus.
Working on the Barcelona Pavilion, Mies willingly responded to the exigencies of the situation, letting them determine the end results, just as Anni Albers let the capabilities as well as the limitations of the medium of thread guide her design of textiles. He had very little time to construct the building, and he was constrained by the season; he knew he could not move the large pieces of marble he desired from the quarry “in the winter because it is still wet inside and it would freeze to bits.”16 Yet he did not want to use brick, the most likely alternative. So he went to a marble depot, where he found onyx blocks that he used as a module, making the pavilion double the height of a single block.
Even when seen only in vintage photographs, the Barcelona Pavilion fills viewers with the sense of well-being that occurs when something has such perfect grace that its ambient rightness enters us. The rich quietude, the clarity without pomp, directly affect our breathing. A sculpture of a female nude by Georg Kolbe, rising gracefully from a shallow pool in front, adds both the perfect humanistic touch and a welcome resting point for the eye amid all the reflections in glass and chrome. Refined to the nth degree yet totally robust, this new form of beauty that Mies invented induces true tranquillity at the same time that it energizes us.
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