Mies used light as an element at the Barcelona Pavilion; shadows and reflections played a major role in the visitor’s experience. With the Kolbe sculpture installed near the entrance, the structure also had a completely human element along with its machined perfection.
IT WAS FOR the flowing reception space in the Barcelona Pavilion that Mies designed the lounge chairs and accompanying ottomans that today proliferate worldwide. The capacious seats now exist in reproductions that range from costly authorized renditions of the originals to poorly made rip-offs, and they are seen in building lobbies, offices, and private residences over much of the globe. They became known quickly, and whereas most of the designs of the Bauhaus furniture workshop were seen by, at best, a dozen people, what Mies made for a large public exhibition in Barcelona received international publicity right away. That success was proof to people at the Bauhaus that the larger world was ready for modernism.
Yet even as the streamlined form of Mies’s elegant Barcelona chairs was admired at the Bauhaus and fulfilled the goals of being ornament-free and using current technology, these pieces of furniture did not represent the values of every Bauhausler. Anni Albers summed up the problem in a word when she said, grimacing, that Mies furniture was “fancy.” The leather and chrome were too much the materials of her uncle’s Hispano-Suiza, and there was the problem of weight. Mies’s chairs were very heavy. This meant that they were awkward to move and costly to ship, which was contrary to the ideals of a lot of Bauhaus design. They were also expensive. And, beyond all that, they were built for royalty, not for the population at large.
The Barcelona chairs were meant to serve as thrones for King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenie when the pavilion opened. As such, they put an ancient idea, laden with tradition, into a totally new form. They may have been intended for monarchical ceremonials, but they threw away every notion of ornament. Where once there might have been brocade or damask, now there was white leather, quilted to hold its position; because of its whiteness, the leather seemed to be more pure and less animal-like than it would have in its natural color. Where the support structure might previously have been laden with carving and gilded to excess, now it was lean and refined, dependent on the tensile strength of metal and the reflective qualities of chrome, formed impeccably into graceful, sloping X’s.
But for all those breakthroughs, this furniture was not meant for the people of every societal rank who were the Bauhaus’s intended clients. The other drawback of the chairs was one they shared with their designer: they presented themselves with great finesse, but had a certain coldness.
Nonetheless, when he became director of the Bauhaus the year after many of its luminaries visited Barcelona to study his work, Mies would give the school a much-needed stability in dire circumstances. Behind his façade, there was considerable humanity, and the strength to uphold important values.
7
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had been offered the directorship of the Bauhaus when Gropius resigned in the spring of 1928. It was only after Mies declined the invitation to go to Dessau that Gropius replaced himself with Hannes Meyer.
Meyer’s directorship wreaked havoc on the school. Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and Herbert Bayer all quickly resigned in frustration with this man who opposed individual experimentation in deference to his Marxist agenda. Meyer’s main interest was functional architecture achieved by group consensus. In 1929, Schlemmer also quit the faculty, and while Albers, Kandinsky, and Klee stayed on, they all felt that the art they most cared about, painting, was becoming less and less significant at the Bauhaus.
In the summer of 1930, the City Council of Dessau notified Meyer that they were terminating his contract. According to the court proceedings, the reason was the city administration’s “concern for a situation brought on by the abuse of the intellectually political aims of Mr. Meyer for party-political agitation, which would have endangered the continued existence of the Bauhaus.” Meyer graciously submitted his resignation prior to the end of the period for which he was contractually allowed to remain, so that Mayor Hesse could appoint his successor, but he published an open letter to Hesse that appeared in the Berlin magazine Das Tagebuch, where he wrote:
Herr Oberbürgmeister! You are attempting to rid the Bauhaus, so heavily infected by me, of the spirit of Marxism. Morality, property, manners, and order are now to return once more hand in hand with the Muses. As my successor you have had Mies van der Rohe prescribed for you and not—according to the statutes—on the advice of the Masters. My colleague, poor fellow, is now expected to take his pickax and demolish my work. … It looks as if this atrocious materialism is to be fought with the sharpest weapons and hence the very life to be beaten out of the innocently white Bauhaus box. …I see through it all.”17
When Mayor Hesse approached Mies, he was intentionally choosing a Bauhaus director who had the strength of character to cope with the maelstrom. Aligned with no political party and focused on abstract design, coming from the outside, used to holding his ground in taxing conditions, Mies was the best possible choice.
Mies’s achievement in Barcelona had already made him well-known at the Bauhaus. I know that Anni and Josef Albers went to Barcelona on their trip to Biarritz and San Sebastian, and were deeply impressed. It seems likely that Klee and Bayer, with whom the Alberses met up in the Basque country, also detoured at the international exposition that summer; besides being of great interest, Barcelona was one of the places where they might have changed trains on their way to the Atlantic coast at the juncture of southern France and northern Spain. Even those Bauhaus masters and students who had not seen the actual building were enthralled by the newspaper and magazine photos. Mies was a regular visitor to Dessau; some of the masters knew him personally, and all were inspired by his work. Whatever Mies’s drawbacks were, most of the students and faculty in Dessau were delighted when, following the troubled stewardship of Hannes Meyer, one of the most accomplished and widely recognized architects in the world took the helm of the school.
That its new director epitomized the acceptance of modernism in the halls of power could only help in the Bauhaus’s perpetual struggle to garner government support and forge connections with industry. Those people who had flocked through the exhibition in Barcelona had, for the most part, responded favorably to Mies’s elegant juxtaposition of sheer planes of marble and glass, and to his use of shimmering chrome. Mies’s work might be more costly and blatantly luxurious than most Bauhaus design, but he knew what it took to expand the audience for unadorned form and for technically advanced design.
Hesse was content to replace the Meyer regime with someone who not only functioned so effectively in the world but was the image of propriety and order. Occasionally Mies switched from a bowler to a homburg, and he could be a dandy, donning spats and a monocle, but, given the tense crosscurrents of German society in 1930, it seemed better to have the face of the Bauhaus be a director who flaunted his elegance than one who was conspicuously left-wing.
LIKE MANY PROSPEROUS BERLINERS of the time, Mies had become overweight. This was true to such a degree that one Bauhaus student observed, “When you see from the distance two men approaching, and nearer to you there is only one man, you will be sure it is Mies.”18 The impression of his size was accentuated by his imposing personality.
But the man who was so large in physique and myth, and who had designed new thrones for the even larger king and queen of Spain, had other sides. Confident people did not find him intimidating, and he restored a degree of calm to the Bauhaus, to the extent possible given the political turmoil outside the school. In March 1932, well into Mies’s reign, Josef Albers wrote his friends Franz and Friedel Perdekamp, “The new director, Mies van der Rohe, that is, he’s been here almost two years, is a splendid chap. He has time, is not loud, and has made work the first principle again.” Albers acknowledged, nonetheless, that the spirit of Weimar was gone. “However,” he continued, “the pleasant neighborliness we had has disappear
ed, though that is not his fault.”19
Albers greatly enjoyed the nightly walks he took with Mies and Kandinsky. He and Mies were just about the same age, and came from similar backgrounds and the same part of the world. The students and younger faculty, however, had a harder time with the new Bauhaus director. The cold eyes beneath the rigid brim of his bowler stared in a way that discomfited some. Mies’s jaw, which seemed to be made of the same steel that supported his architecture, was locked in a set position; his conversational manner was fairly tense.
As for his family, by the time he was directing the Bauhaus, Mies visited his three daughters only once a year. In 1931, they and Ada relocated from the Bavarian Alps—she had completed her psychoanalysis—to Frankfurt. Even though the move put them nearer to Dessau, the physical proximity did not compensate for the father’s increased emotional distance.
WHILE THE POLITICIANS and senior faculty were pleased, younger people were not. Shortly after Mies arrived, the students took over the school cafeteria to show their discontent over Meyer’s dismissal. They demanded that Mies, who was staying aloof in his office, meet with them. Mies’s response was to have the Dessau police evict the students, after which the mayor closed the school and Mies took the further step of having the entire student body, not just the radicals, expelled.
The students all had to reapply to the Bauhaus, and agree to his new rules once they were readmitted. In the eyes of the administration, the draconian measures succeeded: all but twenty of the two hundred former pupils compliantly came on board. Nonetheless, the Bauhaus was clearly losing its utopian aura. This was when Paul Klee resigned.
Mies’s work, however, had a favorable impact on those students and faculty who remained at the school. At this time he designed a house in Guben, a historic market town in what was then East Brandenburg and is today southwestern Poland, right at the German border. It showed a softer, immensely appealing side of his architecture. In a garden that is a precise composition of brick walkways and terraces framing the regularized verdure, Mies had incorporated the qualities of the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch into modern architectural design. This house, for Erich Wolf, made clear the architect’s eye for domestic scale. He manipulated the bricks with the care that would have been accorded them in a bourgeois courtyard, even as he organized them with the clean brush of modernism.
The more one looks at the Wolf house garden, the more one sees its benefits. The depths of the shallow steps invite slow entrances and exits: the modest low balconies prompt meditation. One feels a call for motion and also for full stops. Art is a Zen-like experience: serene and calm while remaining active, and deeply felt. Architecture here inspires slow and steady breathing in and breathing out, and invites the viewer to imbibe the light and shadows gradually. Where Mies has turned a course of bricks, he has done so with utmost precision and care; nothing is left to chance.
This poetry, and the opting for control as well as maximum avoidance of hazard and risk, was a significant issue for the Bauhauslers. Josef Albers, for example, despised a lot of what had occurred in the art of the time because of Marcel Duchamp’s influence; he and most of his Bauhaus colleagues thought it was the artist’s task to impose order, not to embrace disorder or chance. Yet they were not control freaks. They let the rain weather the bricks, and treated the movement of the leaves, even the occasional drip of paint, as valuable determinants of the end results. The true representatives of the Bauhaus ideals were master organizers, and they carefully orchestrated what they did, all the while remaining completely open to playfulness—to the pizzicato. Albers used to say that he worked and worked and worked on his color choices, then threw his hands up in the air and thanked God; Mies’s garden for the Wolfs has that same openness to events beyond human control.
While he was running the Bauhaus, Mies also made a number of plans for sunken courtyards. Intended only for moments of gentle socializing or repose, these were places without immense usefulness or practical function. The architect was deliberately reviving a tradition that has existed in various cultures, and that in China goes back to the Han dynasty (third century B.C. to the third century A.D.). His designs followed the idea of the Hu-t’ung Avenue houses in Beijing in which the courtyard, rather than being at the center of a residence, is closer to the street, from which it is separated by a wall that is a continuation of an external wall of the house.
There is a brazen honesty to this architecture in which the support structure, with its load-bearing elements, is distinct from the curtain walls. There is also a clear affection for nature in the way that inside and outside penetrate and the raw elements and shelter coexist in happy tandem. Everything is rendered beautiful, however, whether it serves to support the building or is an embellishment. Mies believed that nothing in life needed to be ugly to look at. This embodied the essential attitudes of the greatest of the Bauhauslers. Everything—a pair of socks, an extension cord—could exert its magic.
ONCE MIES WAS in Dessau, he and Lilly Reich lived together in an apartment, and she took the helm of the weaving workshop. Ludwig Hilbersheimer, second in command under Mies, also had a wife who was far away, while his mistress, Otti Berger, served as Reich’s assistant. Reich and Mies were at the Bauhaus only three days a week; otherwise, they lived in Berlin, and he ruled in absentia. But he was having such an impact on world architecture, and was so effective in Dessau, that he was given the leeway.
Adding to Mies’s luster in the world, the year he became the Bauhaus director he completed, for a sophisticated couple in Czechoslovakia, a sleek modern palace that redefined luxury. Like Le Corbusier in France, Mies was proving that opulence could not merely have a contemporary look, but could even suggest the future. This was a change from the usual practice of having mansions for the rich invoke the past. Most luxurious residences deliberately echoed Versailles and the schloss of the eighteenth century, or Tudor and Georgian country houses; the goal of their design was not so much aesthetic refinement as an implicit link to landed gentry and to a sense of entitlement and social superiority. Le Corbusier and Mies not only transformed the aesthetics with which privileged people would live; they invoked a radically different value system.
Like the Barcelona Pavilion, the house Mies designed for Fritz and Grete Tugendhat on the outskirts of Brno gave unprecedented voice to the beauty of functional forms—undisguised radiator pipes, frankly welded joints—and evoked a richness in unadorned materials previously considered beyond the pale. This was the place for which Mies designed what would become the best-known coffee table of the twentieth century: a simple X-shaped base made from four bar angles and an unframed glass top.
Almost as familiar today is the dining room chair, known as the Brno chair, that Mies put into the house. At the Bauhaus, and to the audience that was growing for his work worldwide, Mies’s name was identified with a philosophy of “less is more.” It is impossible to imagine how a seat, chair back, and arms could be arranged more minimally or more eloquently then in the Brno chair.
PHILIP JOHNSON was a dinner guest at the Tugendhat house shortly after it was built. While not yet an architect, the American visitor was an unpaid director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the recently formed Museum of Modern Art and hence one of the key figures involved in disseminating information about the Bauhaus in America. Because people from all over the world went to New York City to discover what was happening in culture internationally, Johnson’s admiration for the Bauhaus would have vital echoes. Describing the Tugendhat house, he praised “the exquisite perfection of details” and “a scrupulousness unparalleled in our day.”20
The Tugendhat house was constructed at the edge of a fairy-tale landscape of crenellated castles perched on jagged mountains, and old churches that are all curve and fantasy. Its apparent severity was not unknown to the Bauhauslers; Gropius’s villas, as well as a lot of other housing by the architects whose work was included at Weissenhof, were in the same vein. But it still presented a startling
and powerful alternative to the Baroque and Jugendstil styles that dominated contemporary domestic architecture.
Fritz Tugendhat had grown up in houses where antimacassars were the order of the day, but Grete Tugendhat said her husband had “a horror of the doilies and knickknacks that overloaded every room” of his childhood homes. They both craved “clear and simple forms.”21 By picking Mies as their architect, not only did they get chairs of unadorned leather and steel, but the ornament in their house was nil, the sight lines uncluttered. The Tugendhats endorsed Mies’s pioneering notions of beauty, reevaluating what was appropriate as a source of household materials and what it took to make a home elegant. The young Czech couple were delighted to inhabit a setting as efficient and unembellished as the latest manufacturing machine. At the same time, they created a residence for themselves and their children as refined, as poetic, as rich in certain elements, as the palaces of earlier eras.
THEIR HOUSE was a wedding present from Grete Tugendhat’s father, among the richest men in Brno in the 1920s. He had given her the sloping site overlooking Brno, with a commanding view of cathedral steeples and the turrets of Spielberg castle. She had admired the open spaces, as well as the large glass doors that separated the living room from the garden, in the house of Edward Fuchs in Berlin, and had asked the name of the architect. Learning it was Mies van der Rohe, she arranged a meeting.
The Bauhaus Group Page 60