That emphasis on reason went hand in hand with his belief in aesthetic judgment; Mies had strict criteria for appearance in which there were definite standards for beauty. He said to one of his first students, “Come now, Selman, if you meet twin sisters who are equally healthy, intelligent, and wealthy and both can bear children, but one is ugly, the other beautiful, which one would you marry?”35
It was because of his unwavering conviction about what looked good and what did not that Mies lambasted Gropius’s architectural work in front of his students, and felt free to remark that the name “Bauhaus” was Gropius’s greatest achievement. Movements, causes, and institutional loyalty were all secondary to quality; visual perfection was what counted. Mies wasn’t one for teamwork. Once, in a conversation with Gropius in Chicago, long after the closing of the Bauhaus, when Gropius was extolling the merits of group efforts and collaborative architecture, Mies asked, “Gropius: If you decide to have a baby, do you call in the neighbors?”36 Mies pushed his own art to its maximum; he expected nothing less from others. The only way to push ahead was in solitude.
ON DECEMBER 20, 1931, Dearstyne, who was American and had attended Columbia University before going to the Bauhaus, wrote home to his parents from Dessau:
One of the uncomfortable sides of associating with an architect of the first rank is that he ruins your taste for about all but one-half of one percent of all other architecture that’s being done the world over. Mies van der Rohe not only comes down hard on the American architects (for which he has, without a shadow of a doubt, the most perfect justification) but holds that one doesn’t need the fingers of one hand to count the German architects who are doing good work. … It’s much easier to work under less critical men and content yourself with middle-rate work. That’s what I was doing at Columbia and what most of the students in America (and here) are doing. But I thank my stars I landed where I did.37
Josef Albers, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, ca. 1930. Albers, who described Mies as “a great guy,” hoped that as director of the Bauhaus the elegant architect would be able to save the school, in spite of opposition from within and without.
That emphasis on perfection is one of the contradictions of the Bauhaus. A dozen years earlier, Gropius had founded a school where the primary goal was to improve design for the masses. But the greatest of the faculty he attracted to Weimar and Dessau believed mainly in their own work, and in the development of artistic excellence and consciousness of true quality, more than the issue of audience. It was the nurturing of the design and the making of the paintings that mattered more than the promulgation of the idea. They would be delighted if quality became widespread, and if what was good and true made an impact on the lives of viewers and users, but they knew they could not change the way the masses responded to art and design. What they could do was develop and support the vision of a very small number of gifted people. They readily excluded second-rate practitioners.
Mies believed in Albers and Klee and Kandinsky, but not in the second tier of painters. Albers didn’t believe in Mies, or Gropius, or Breuer, as architects. Kandinsky admired Klee; Klee mainly admired the artists of ancient Egypt and the chefs who had created a perfect “spaghetti a la sugo.” Anni Albers mostly liked the work of Klee and Coco Chanel. They all abhorred the idea of blind enthusiasm for “the arts” without quality judgment, and loathed a blanket fondness for the idea of creativity as promulgated by well-intentioned but undiscerning “culture” lovers. They preferred the contents of good hardware stores to what was found at craft fairs, and would rather watch sports well played than see a sloppy dance performance.
The idea that just being in a “creative” field conferred some sort of distinction was anathema to the true Bauhauslers. They had the highest standards for excellence and were the most discerning of connoisseurs. They were, in short, aesthetic snobs.
9
With his reverence for greatness, Mies embodied the attitude to the past as it was endorsed by most of the leading Bauhauslers. When he had a supporting column stand on the outside of a building, he was proud to have adhered to one of the primary principles of Gothic construction. When he put the column under the roof slab, he was aware that he had followed a norm of the Renaissance. His interest in monumentality, derived from the great Romanesque structures in his native Aachen, had been reinforced by his exposure to the architecture of Schinkel in Berlin; he acknowledged the influence openly. He gladly credited his more immediate predecessors as well as the historical ones. Mies let the students know, for example, how much he admired Berlage, the architect he had recommended to Helene Kröller-Müller, even if he then became furiously competitive when Herr Müller opted for Berlage’s design over his own. Mies said of Berlage’s De Beurs building in Amsterdam, “The idea of clear construction came to me there, as one of the fundamentals we should accept. We can talk about that easily, but to do it is not easy.”38
Like so many of his Bauhaus colleagues, Mies was greatly excited by number systems—in art and architecture as in nature. This is another reason that Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, the building that had been his introduction to the emotional power of visible form, remained a point of reference throughout his life. The thirty-three-meter-high chapel was an octagon, encased by a sixteen-sided polygon. The building is based on a single unit of measurement that was carefully doubled or halved throughout.
When Albrecht Dürer visited Aachen, he recognized the ways in which the chapel exemplified the architectural principles elucidated by Vitruvius in the Roman era and that subsequently had such influence on Leon Battista Alberti and Andrea Palladio in the Renaissance. Vitruvius believed that the requisites of a good building were functionalism, firmness, and an ability to bring a sense of pleasure. This came not just from qualities of measure and proportion, but also from the choice of materials. Odo of Metz, the architect who began work on the chapel in Aachen in 792, had demanded the demolition of Roman ruins to acquire just the right stone, and had scavenged fine materials at various locations to enrich the chapel. As a young boy, Ludwig Mies had feasted his eyes on its rich mosaics, marble columns, and bronze parapets.
With the Barcelona Pavilion, the minutest measurements and the deployment of beautiful materials were pivotal. The shallow reflecting pool gains its breathtaking beauty because of the thickness and extension of the overhang that surrounds it. We feel a Beethovenesque perfection here: were those slabs of travertine a centimeter thicker or thinner, we would not be nearly as moved. And the deep gray travertine, one of nature’s most marvelous stones with its ever-changing network of veins, is like the sound of a Stradivarius perfectly bowed: a splendid object deftly employed.
BUT MIES’S DETAILS were pricey, and not everyone had the fortunes of the Spanish government or of Grete Tugendhat’s parents. Shortly after he became director of the Bauhaus, Mies designed a house for the painter Emil Nolde. It did not get built because it was too expensive, and Mies was unwilling to make the changes that might have made it work with Nolde’s budget.
He then designed an apartment in New York for his admirer and champion Philip Johnson. In this case, the client had the money. Not only was Johnson, a rich young man whose father had bequeathed him a lot of stock in the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), able to serve in his position at the recently founded Museum of Modern Art without a salary, but he could afford the bachelor digs of a prince. When Johnson was touring Europe to study modern architecture in the summer of 1930, he called on Mies in Berlin and commissioned the apartment. They discussed the project while the young American millionaire drove Mies around in his Cord, one of the fanciest automobiles of the era, and over lavish meals with fine wines in the city’s most expensive restaurants.
Johnson complained that Mies put as much work into the apartment “as if it were six skyscrapers.”39 Nevertheless, he was proud of the apartment that resulted. The Bauhaus director, in his first project in America, had created, in a building at 424 East Fifty-second Street, just around the corner
from New York’s elegant Sutton Place, a space with spare and elegant lines and an assertively modern atmosphere. Lilly Reich executed it, and she, like Johnson, delighted in the effrontery to the other inhabitants in the building who could not imagine living with anything other than flower-patterned chintz and Chippendale-style armchairs. Reich installed Mies’s Barcelona chairs—it was the American debut of this three-year-old design—as well as solid, raw silk curtains and Chinese floor matting. Johnson enjoyed embracing a style that shocked his Harvard classmates and the other wealthy people in his circle. It wasn’t just that he liked Mies van der Rohe’s aesthetics; what appealed to him above all was the feeling that adhering to them made him different, and better, than other people.
I talked with Philip Johnson quite a lot about this project a number of years ago. Johnson was in his office in the Seagram Building, Mies’s greatest New York project, and one for which Johnson had found Mies the client and on which Johnson had worked.
Johnson, impeccably dressed as always in a Savile Row suit that honored every dimension of his lean body, sneered when he told me that the apartment had “a lamp which was as bad as any lighting fixture you could imagine. It threw a miserable cold light, but Mies only cared about it as an object.”40
Philip Johnson delighted in denigrating his former hero. For many years after that initial collaboration, Johnson imitated Mies shamelessly in his own work, borrowing the master’s overall forms as well as his choices of Macassar ebony and travertine marble, putting Mies’s furniture into almost all of his own architectural projects. But he came to dislike Mies, and while Johnson made an art of accommodating his clients, of befriending them and making them feel that his architecture served their needs, he was intent that I see Mies’s selfishness and coldness.
IN RESEARCHING THIS BOOK, I acquired new perspective on Johnson’s antipathy. The apartment on East Fifty-second Street, I learned from letters that passed between Johnson and Mies, had caused the first of many disputes between them. In 1934, Mies was “provoked” (Johnson’s word) that Johnson had apparently copied Mies’s furniture “without proper credit.” Johnson blamed the misunderstanding on House & Garden magazine; he told Mies that the magazine, which featured the apartment, had failed to use information Johnson had provided that named Mies as the designer of furniture Johnson had had made for the apartment. Johnson went on the defensive. Referring to an apartment he, Johnson, had designed for his friend Edward M. M. Warburg—the same person who had gone to the Bauhaus to buy work by Klee and who had funded the Alberses’ steamship tickets to America—he wrote Mies, “I have in no way, by intention or deed, done anything to take credit for your designs. I have used, it is true, the drawings which you sold me to make furniture for my own apartment and for Mr. Warburg. Everyone has been fully aware, so far as I knew, that the designs are yours”41
Johnson went on to tell Mies that he was including in a show at the Modern one of Mies’s Brno chairs, “which I’m proud to attribute to you.” From there, the Alcoa heir turned positively obsequious, while also self-aggrandizing, in what he wrote to Mies. He seemed to fear and admire the Bauhaus’s last director in equal measure. Johnson wrote, “I am not sure to what extent you realize how well-known you have become in the United States and in what great honor all modern architects hold you and your work, nor do I believe I am immodest in saying this is in a great measure due to my efforts on your behalf through exhibitions, articles and lectures. May I congratulate you on the magnificent installation of the Exhibition in Berlin this summer, and assure you once more of my never diminishing respect for you and your work.”42
MIES WROTE JOHNSON back promptly. The post took about two weeks by ship, and the architect, in Berlin, answered his worshipper’s entreaty shortly after receiving it:
Dear Johnson,
Thank you for your letter of 2nd November of this year. I gather that you are considering an exhibition of works by my former pupils. I am not sure exactly who you are thinking of. It is out of the question to regard somebody as my pupil who only worked with me for a short time at the Bauhaus. So if you really do intend to follow through with this idea I must ask you to send me precise details of your plans. I take my work and the modern architecture movement far too seriously to accept responsibility for events or works with which I am not familiar; all the more so as recently there have come to my attention more and more American claims that the modern architecture movement is just a fad. That is very dangerous and gives us all the more reason to consider future public appearances very carefully and apply the strictest standards. I am happy that all is well with you and remain
With best wishes, Yours43
Philip Johnson responded immediately, in a huff:
My dear Mies van der Rohe,
Thank you for your letter of November 23.
I must say that I am surprised at the tone of your letter.
You know from my writings I have always had the highest respect for you and for the purity of the architecture for which you stand. I am not at all interested in modes or fashions in various kinds of modern.
I am leaving the Museum of Modern Art and the world of architecture in New York and so will have no opportunity to carry out my plan of showing the work of your students. The Museum of Modern Art will have no more architectural exhibitions so you need fear no further publicity in America.
Yours very sincerely.44
Johnson’s prediction, or threat, did not prove true. After World War II, not only would Mies van der Rohe live and build in America, but he would count Philip Johnson among his greatest supporters.
IN 1986, AT A SYMPOSIUM at the Museum of Modern Art in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Mies’s birth, Philip Johnson would proclaim to the large and attentive audience, “No other architect in history has ever produced so much original work in such a few years.” He credited Mies with having “invented the international style with the office building;” and he said that the brick and concrete country houses and the curved skyscraper were all without equal.45 This was consistent with the views of Mies’s grandson, Dirk Lohan, who said that in the late twenties Mies was at his creative apogee. Lohan told the audience that after the Nazis rose to power, Mies was out of work; he mainly read and lived off royalties from his furniture designs. And while he produced some exquisite buildings after he went to the United States in 1938, when he was fifty-two, nothing was ever again as purely inventive as what he had done when the Bauhaus flourished.
Philip Johnson’s encomium for Mies’s work at the centenary symposium did not result from an improvement in their relationship. Their last encounter had been at Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, a building that made unquestionable reference to Mies’s work in a myriad of ways. On that occasion, Johnson asked Mies what he thought of Berlage. “He got up and walked out,” Johnson recounted at the symposium. It was about 11 p.m., and Johnson had to phone friends to come pick Mies up outside the house so he could spend the night with them, since he refused to return to Johnson’s, which is where he was meant to stay. As Johnson told his startled listeners, “You don’t use the word truth around Mies because he had his own idea of what it was. … He broke any of his rules anytime he wanted to. But woe be to you if you broke them or if he didn’t like the way you broke them.”46
10
When he was sixty-two years old, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe told a small group of design students about his experience at the Bauhaus. Although it was an informal talk rather than a lecture, it was recorded and transcribed:
I became director of the Bauhaus only because Gropius came one morning with the Mayor of Dessau and told me: “the school will break to pieces if you don’t take it.” He said that if I would take it over it would go ahead. And later in 1932, the Nazis came. Nobody’s position was strong enough for that. In 1933 I closed the Bauhaus. Maybe that is interesting to you.
You know the rise of the Nazi movement was not so sudden. It began at Dessau. That was the first state that became b
y election Nazi. After the Nazis came to power, the mayor told me they wanted to see what the Bauhaus was doing and so on. They wanted an exhibition for criticism, and he said, “I know you would like a vacation for two weeks. I am delighted to give you a vacation,” and I said, “No. I’d like to stay here. I’d like to see these people.” And I did.
Then they came. It was a long talk. There was one man; his name was Schulz-Naumburg, and he wrote early, you know, about 1900, works on cultural tendencies in general, about old buildings and about the factories ruining the country—sentimental, aesthetic, typical of the misunderstanding of his day. [Mies was referring to the series of books called Deutsche Kulturarbeiten.] He wanted to change. He wanted to save wonderful towns. You cannot save wonderful towns. You can only save wonderful towns by building new ones.
That’s all you can do. He was a man in the Nazi movement, very old with a gold medal. [Here Mies was referring to the Nazis’ gold party badge.] There were only about ninety that had these gold medals. He was one of these men. And he came, and we gave an exhibition at the Bauhaus. I tried everything, to keep that in order. And we made a wonderful exhibition, and I had a heck of a time you know, with Kandinsky. Kandinsky had his constructions of old pictures, these geometric analyses. I said, “Do we have to show these?” And he had a fit. So I said, “Keep it.” And we put it on the table that was in the center of a huge room. Everything was around and this analysis was on the table. When these people came we had a talk, and then I showed them what we were doing. I moved them, you know, around the walls. They never saw the table.
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