From the start, according to Grete Tugendhat, the Tugendhats knew they “were in the same room with an artist.” Mies and the people in his Berlin office, from which he commuted to Dessau, had one radical idea after another, and the Tugendhats accepted them all. Years later, Mies would recall that the Tugendhats—Fritz more than Grete—gave him a hard time and initially resisted each new concept, but those reminiscences are considered largely inaccurate, intended mainly to enhance his own glory.
In keeping with the site, Mies put the top floor, which contained the bedrooms and nursery, at street level. The court in front of it leads to a wraparound balcony, which in turn connects on both ends with a terrace on the other side facing the view. Inside the entrance hall are steps that lead down to the lower level—a vast open space in which all that separates the living room, dining room, and library are two freestanding walls, one curved and one flat. These rooms, mostly sheathed in glass, open to the lawn and the city.
That large, continuous living/dining area, fifty by eighty feet, is punctuated by cross-shaped columns made by the joining of four L-beams encased in chrome. Similar to those Mies used in the Barcelona Pavilion, they help support the building. What gives the house its structure is also a source of beauty. Plainly visible horizontal slats are handsome evidence of one of the first air-conditioning systems in Europe, for which the air was initially blown from ice stored in the basement. Heat comes through straightforward steel tubing. Modern technology is at the fore; the floor of the living/dining area is an expanse of white linoleum.
THERE WAS, however, no rule that everything had to be machine-made. The carpets, of natural wool, were woven by hand. Some of the materials are quite fine and exotic. The flat wall was tawny gold and white onyx from Algeria; draperies were Swedish linen and black and beige raw silk. White velvet and Macassar ebony were abundant. The cantilevered chairs had lean lines that reflected the latest engineering advances and eschewed all decoration, but their coverings were of the finest pigskin and cowhide.
For these details, the past tense applies, for while the house still stands, it has mostly been gutted. But when the Tugendhats moved in, just as Mies became the director of the Bauhaus, the mix of natural abundance, human handwork, and modern technology was remarkable.
This respect for natural elements and the creation of exquisite and original objects, many of them one of a kind, was embraced at the Bauhaus. Even as Gropius had worked for the global spread of good design, artists like Klee, Kandinsky, and the Alberses were, first and foremost, in pursuit of sources of beauty and a feeling of wonder. Theory, concepts, and an aesthetic philosophy to be promulgated worldwide were less of an issue; a recapitulation of life’s marvels was the primary focus. Mies was the right person to forge ahead with that agenda of celebration.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Tugendhat house, 1928–30. The house Mies created for adventurous young patrons in the recently formed Czechoslovakia offered beautiful and unprecedented sights from every angle, inside and out.
Beauty might come in an expensive package—the Alberses would, at the end of their lives, love the leather upholstery of their Mercedes-Benz 240 SL—or it could be free and easy to find, as in the seashells Klee collected, the beach pebbles Josef Albers admired, and the tree bark Anni Albers cherished as one of the finest designs she had ever seen. Or beauty could be the result of mechanical effectiveness, as with Kandinsky’s beloved racing bicycle, which he was pleased to have Gabriele Münter return to him when he was in Dessau. It could be natural and readily accessible, like the trees Klee studied every day during his strolls in the parks of Weimar and Dessau, or exotic like the tropical fish Klee kept in his aquarium. It could be sensuous in its impact, as it was for Gropius from the moment he began to fall sway to the allure of women as a young man in Spain, and to develop a connoisseur’s attraction to the opposite sex. Beauty might also be new and experimental, like Kandinsky’s paintings and Stravinsky’s music, or ancient and in a humble peasant style, like the folk art furniture Kandinsky adored. As at the Tugendhat house, the only requisite for visible form was that it be wonderful.
IN BRNO, Mies personally designed every detail: the heating pipes, the drapery track holders, the door handles, the wooden-slatted venetian blinds, the lighting fixtures. For the living and dining areas, he built large glass walls overlooking the city; they could be electrically raised and lowered in increments, allowing them to disappear completely if so desired. He arranged the furniture meticulously. There was a black pearwood dining table supported by a single X-sectioned column. Without its leaf, it allowed intimate dining for the Tugendhats and their three children; with the leaf in, up to twenty-four people could be seated in those Brno chairs.
Brno had an ancient past, but in 1930 it was also a thriving modern city. The head of the Czechoslovakian republic then was Tomás Masaryk, whose broad cultural viewpoint was the reason Josef Albers had been summoned to speak at a conference in Prague. In 1918, Masaryk had been elected the first president of the recently formed republic. He had attended grammar school in Brno, where he earned money by tutoring the family of a police chief. Early on, Masaryk had advocated the eight-hour workday and education for women. Having led Czechoslovakia to liberation from the Habsburg monarchy, he condemned oppression in any form, opposed outmoded relics of the past, and was sympathetic to all new ways of thinking, including the most recent developments in art and architecture. The Tugendhat house was built in a hospitable environment.
But the world soon changed. In 1931, the German magazine Die Form declared the Tugendhat house unlivable, an ostentatious showpiece more than a home. The Tugendhats defended their choices in a subsequent issue of the magazine, saying that the spaces gave them a new freedom, and that even if it was impossible to rearrange the furniture or hang pictures in the main living area, the wood graining and marble patterns offered great aesthetic richness and diversity.
They made this statement in an article titled “Can One Live in the Tugendhat House?” The participants in the discussion, besides Franz and Grete Tugendhat, included Ludwig Hilbersheimer and several writers on architecture. One critic, Justus Bier, attacked the open plan of the house, saying that it made privacy impossible, and protested the bold wood grain and powerful stone pattern of the walls and floors, insisting that they not only made it impossible to hang art, but also caused the architect’s presence to dominate that of the clients. Another critic, Roger Ginsburger, a Marxist, referred to “immoral luxury.”22
Grete Tugendhat said the house provided “an important feeling of existence.” The “large and austerely simple” rooms, she said, were “liberating” and had the effect of making one see “every flower in a different light” and causing people to “stand out more clearly against such a background.”23
This was the unifying Bauhaus wish: to intensify seeing. Alertness mattered in multiple realms; it was vital to see the possibilities of color and line, of thread, of the working of the psyche, of the visual aspects of sound, or of the impact of design on our lives.
Grete Tugendhat also credited the house with rhythms that provided “a very particular tranquility.”24 Visual occurrences were the source of emotional well-being.
IT WOULD TAKE MORE than words, however, to defend the Tugendhats’ way of life. What would happen in Brno, in the surprisingly near future, was to be the fate of so much of the physical legacy of the Bauhaus. The couple, who were Jewish, left Czechoslovakia in 1938, the year before the Third Reich entered. Soon thereafter, Albert Messerschmitt, the aircraft manufacturer, moved into the house. In 1944, as the Wehrmacht was falling apart on the eastern front, the Red Army took over. Mies van der Rohe’s biographer Franz Schulze writes: “The Russians rode their horses up and down the travertine garden staircase and roasted oxen on a spit in front of the onyx wall.”25 The curved ebony dining room wall was destroyed.
In postwar Czechoslovakia, the house fell into further disrepair. When I visited about twenty years ago, when it was still a challenge ju
st to get a visa to an eastern bloc country, Brno had generally deteriorated after decades of bureaucratic Communist rule. Grim apartment blocks proliferated alongside remnants of Baroque glory. Although a new spirit was in the air, the city looked down-at-the-heels, as did the house. Between 1952 and 1985, local authorities had restored Mies’s masterpiece at a cost of six million crowns for the building and one million for the garden, but not all for the better.
The Tugendhats’ family home had become a guest house for official visitors to Brno, and parts of it were open to the public for guided tours on Saturday and Sunday. The building still had some of its old power, but the differences from photographs of the house in its original state were shocking. Not a stick of the original furniture remained. Recent Czechoslovakian art in low-priced frames hung here and there, and televisions were everywhere. An antenna on the roof of the house did no kindness to Mies’s pure and perfect form. A notice was taped to the curved entrance wall, now made of opaque plastic panels rather than the original milk glass, and leaks were visible in the ceiling. The only way to enter the garden was to jump the padlocked fence.
But it is no surprise that it was not possible, or desirable, for the Communist government to re-create the atmosphere of a private residence where seventeen servants once worked. Indeed, the idea of an onyx panel worth three million crowns is troublesome in a country where there has been such suffering. And even if it had not entirely honored the aesthetic of the Tugendhat house, the city of Brno had at least kept it alive. In spite of its deterioration, the onyx wall, and many other elements of the original house, made thrilling viewing.
Unable to reconstruct the floor-to-ceiling glass walls to their original appearance, the authorities in Brno had still managed to redo them with a seam, and they had the curved dining room wall rebuilt. The lawn needed seeding, and one longed for the garden on which Mies had carefully consulted, but at least the garden façade was intact and was still an exceptionally harmonic abstract composition. The intersection of machined planes at right angles—whether in outside details or in the travertine marble slabs over the radiators—remained a powerful form of modern beauty. The trees had grown higher than Mies might have wished, but visitors could still walk on a sweep of balcony and gaze at the castles and church towers.
I particularly relished the chance to sit on an extraordinary semicircular bench that typifies Mies’s eye and his imagination with materials. The bench, which echoes the shape of the dining room wall, is made of wood on cinder blocks with backing of stovepipe. The materials are rough, but the form is gentle. At his best, Mies van der Rohe could be exceedingly generous in his understanding of the need for grace and pleasantness in everyday life.
Moreover, the chrome-plated X-columns were still sculptural and functional at the same time, noble yet lighthearted. And given that the Barcelona Pavilion no longer stands, except in a reproduction, they provide an opportunity to relish one of the pavilion’s key features. Other original details—the wooden blinds, the frankly functional heating and air-conditioning systems—were also in evidence. And the onyx wall reflected and absorbed the setting sun with the bravura it had sixty years earlier. The travertine marble was still in the entrance hall. Few of Mies’s lighting fixtures remained, but one of his designs for a ceiling lamp had been reproduced in a number of rooms. Throughout the house, the ebony was remarkable. The bedroom doors, each almost eleven and a half feet high, dazzled with both their warmth and their scale.
What a unique and salubrious house this once was. There was still an enclosed winter garden. The library needed additional restoration and the correct furnishings, but at least its dramatic shelving was unchanged, and I could glimpse an adjoining space that gave great insight into the Tugendhats’ way of life: a small cubicle in which Fritz Tugendhat kept his business papers. He felt that such papers were unattractive in a home and should be out of sight. A library was for loftier purposes, and children should not concern themselves with money matters.
That degree of cultivation, and deference to a seamless style of everyday living, reflected the attitude that made Mies van de Rohe’s taste so ideal for his patrons. Refinement, dignity, and the mix of careful understatement with consummate luxury reached their apogee in the Tugendhat dwelling, where a young and forward-thinking couple gave an architect of such exceptional vision and courage the opportunity to have his full voice.
IN 1933, during a period when Mies was visiting the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin every other day in an effort to determine the fate of the Bauhaus, he was pleased that Kandinsky had raved to Galka Scheyer about the Tugendhat house to such an extent that he was asked to send photos of it to her in Hollywood, California. She, in turn, planned to show the images to an American collector, who presumably might want a similar dwelling.
Later in his life, however, Mies would not consider the Tugendhat house that important. In 1965, when the distinguished art critic Katharine Kuh interviewed him for the Saturday Review in his Chicago office, he remarked that “the Tugendhat House was considered outstanding, but I think only because it was the first modern house to use rich materials, to have great elegance. … I personally don’t consider the Tugendhat House more important than other works that I designed considerably earlier.”26
This was part of his attempt to rewrite history, to suggest that he had been a breakthrough modernist in the early 1920s, when in truth he was still designing relatively traditional houses for his clients at that time. The word “considerably” was part of a deliberate effort to put himself at the forefront. He shared with many other architects the wish to say “I did it first.” In fact, it took some of the inroads made thanks to the Bauhaus, and the acceptance accorded the pioneering villas constructed by Le Corbusier well in advance of Mies actually building (as opposed to just designing) truly modern structures, before Mies could do anything as bold as the Tugendhat house.
Nonetheless, this confident, optimistic, rhythmic assemblage of concrete, glass, and steel was a masterpiece of visual effects and rhythmic and textural richness. That Mies got to certain things a few years after other people, and even as the great era of modernism in Germany was already coming to an end, is important to our understanding of architectural history, but the quality of his achievement is unique. The timing of his stint at the Bauhaus, similarly, made him someone who furthered something that others had developed rather than that he initiated, but he did so with verve.
8
As a teacher at the Dessau Bauhaus, Mies worked only with advanced students. He started them out with the seemingly simple task of designing “a single-bedroom house facing a walled garden.”27 Then he had them try to perfect their schemes, repeatedly telling them to go back to their drawing boards to improve their work.
This class for half a dozen students was the first teaching Mies had done anywhere. He was far from gentle. Two of the students, Hermann Blomeier and Willi Heyerhoff, who had attended architecture school together in Holzminder, where both had been highly successful, showed Mies some plans they had made there. Howard Dearstyne, another of the group of six, reported that “Mies rode roughshod over them, marking them up with a black pencil to indicate how they should have been done.”28 The two students were so upset that they did not return to the class for a month.
Mies’s general response to whatever the students did was “try it again.”29 He spoke in a quiet voice, but he was emphatic. On that first simple project, he had the future architects work and rework the details for months before allowing them to proceed to the larger structure they were dreaming of.
Mies articulated his own goals as an educator. “You can teach students how to work; you can teach them technique—how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions—of order.” That teaching, he believed, would enable the student “to reach their potential, and this differs, of course, for each student.” On this last point he was adamant: “But the different potentials are not the teacher’s problem. … Some students you simply cannot tea
ch.”30 He did not care about people as much as about architecture; he had decided that only a few good students were needed to make good architecture everywhere, and therefore his only concern was to develop the most gifted pupils.
“I thought a lot and I controlled my thoughts in my work—and I controlled my work through my thoughts,” he declared of his own approach.31This gave him license to speak as little as he wanted. One of his former students said that when one asked Mies a question, “he simply would not respond. If you pressed him he was likely to get quite ill-tempered about it. … I’m not talking about questions that were asked spitefully, but serious questions. He simply would brush them aside.”32
That same abruptness came through in an interview Mies granted late in his life to six college students. “Some people think our problem is the human situation today, but that is a general problem. That is not an architectural problem.” Mies was deliberately taking a stand opposite to that of Le Corbusier, with whom he felt a rivalry, and who maintained that architecture was “in the service of mankind.” Crusty to the point of nastiness, Mies was emphatic about his belief that rationalism and intelligence could be applied to all problems, and were more important than personal responses. He amplified on the idea that “the human situation” was not the concern of architecture: “You can prove something logical by reason. You cannot prove feelings. Everyone has emotions and this is the hell of our time. Everyone says they have a right to their opinion, but they really only have the right to express their opinion.”33
He believed he could construct every element not just of his buildings but of his personal existence with rigor and perpetual fine-tuning. What was vital was to take time and think things through, rather than to rush or to succumb to emotions. He told the six students, “I had 3,000 books in Germany. I spent a fortune to buy these books and I spent a fortune to read them, to study them. I brought 300 books with me to America and I can now send 270 books back and I would lose nothing. But I would not have these 30 left if I would not have read the 3,000.”34
The Bauhaus Group Page 61