“By their fruits, so shall ye know them.”
—Jesus of Nazareth

The year 1986 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Mies, the man who, under the name of Mies van der Rohe, did the most to shape modern American architecture. Of the numerous books that marked Fred Butzen is a technical writer for a publisher of computer languages and operating systems. this occasion, perhaps the most important is the biography by Franz Schulze, a scholar and critic of contemporary architecture. Thorough, honest, gracefully written, richly illustrated, and well designed, it invites a reevaluation of Mies’s work as the most catastrophic failure of art in the 20th century, suited Mies well, for he was drawn to where the spirit of the times was manifesting itself most powerfully—i.e., to where “the action” was. In the 1920’s, the action was certainly among the radicals.

From 1918 to 1927, Mies worked mainly on theoretical projects which attracted attention at exhibitions. In 1926, he built the first of his works in the modern, geometric style: a monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Photographs indicate that the monument was visually compelling, if one ignores the huge steel hammer and sickle at its side. Mies does not appear to have been a Communist or committed to any cause other than himself and his work; rather, he would work for nearly anyone who gave him artistic latitude. It is noteworthy that his first modernist design to be built is more a sculpture than a building.

In 1927, Mies was named artistic director of the Weissenhofseidlung, a model housing project near Stuttgart. Mies solicited work from many radical young architects; their designs meshed so well that they seemed to embody an “international style”—by which name this school is best known. In 1929, Mies built his most highly praised work, the German Pavilion for the Barcelona World’s Fair. The “Barcelona Pavilion” stood only for six months and was used only once, but it is still named one of the greatest of all modern buildings.

In 1929 Mies was named the head of the Bauhaus, which he oversaw for the last four years of its life. Under his leadership, the Bauhaus turned away from hurdy-gurdy experimentation to teaching Mies’s ideas on architecture and design. He also took a firm stand against student radicalism, at one point expelling the entire student body. In 1933, he closed the Bauhaus rather than submit to the control of the National Socialists.

In 1938, Mies became the head of the department of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Before he came to Chicago, much of his work was “paper architecture”; of buildings he had only a handful, mostly private homes. Chicago offered Mies the chance to build large for the first time. His first major commission was to design the entire IIT campus; there, he built the first of the glass and steel “boxes” with which his name is associated. From this point to his death in 1969, Mies designed the buildings for which he is best known: 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, the Seagram Building, the Farnsworth House, the Toronto-Dominion Centre, and many others. Despite the number and the variety of his commissions, however, his work became marked by sameness. As Schulze notes, Mies evolved two basic designs that he used over and over: the “prismatic tower and the pavilion of unitary space.” Mies’s inclination to the sachlich, the unadorned and functional, moved him to an impersonal work that, oddly, was quite expressive.

Ludwig Mies was born in Aachen. His father, Michael, was a stone carver. Mies himself described how once, when his brother suggested a shortcut in stone-carving, Michael said, “Do you know the finial at the top of the spire in Cologne? Well, you can’t crawl up there and get a good look at it, but it is carved as if you could. It was made for God.”

Mies attended the local cathedral school, then the Gewebeschule, where he learned the building trade. His schooling ended at age 15, when he found a job as a draftsman in a local stucco factory. When he was 19, Mies obtained a position as a draftsman in a Berlin architect’s office.

In those days, it was possible to become an architect by working in an architect’s office instead of going to school. Mies aspired to become more than a draftsman; within a year of moving to Berlin, he went to work for Bruno Paul, the leader of a group of radical young architects who insisted on simplicity and geometric form, or Sachlichkeit (“reality,” “impartiality”).

Mies’s first ventures into architecture were free-lance commissions to build homes. He soon secured a position with Peter Behrens, one of Germany’s leading young architects and an advocate of Sachlichkeit. Behrens built public architecture—factories and pavilions—and in his office Mies heard the other young architects discuss how industrialization affected art and society.

In 1913, Mies married Ada Bruhn, the daughter of a wealthy inventor. A year or so older than Mies, Ada was a wealthy, self-consciously modern woman who had studied “eurhythmies” and was willing to tolerate and underwrite her husband.

After spending World War I as a clerk in the army, Mies returned to Berlin. It was a revolutionary time, with sachlich radicals competing with expressionist ones. Mies cofounded a journal called G (for Gestaultung) and spent much time in artistic politicking, allowing his thought on architecture to solidify. As he wrote in G: “Essentially our task is to free the practice of building from the control of aesthetic speculators and restore it to what it should exclusively be: Building.” Architecture, to him, was an independent and self-contained art, while patrons who attempted to influence it in ways not dictated by building itself were “aesthetic speculators” whose influence should be minimized.

The early 1920’s also saw the publication of Spengler’s Decline of the West. It appears to have affected Mies deeply; his copy is heavily marked. From then to his death, Mies’s writings would be punctuated by Spenglerian assertions: “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space” or “Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form.” Spengler gave Mies the second pillar of his thought: that the only authentic architecture is that which embodies the spirit of its time. This principle also of his personality. Schulze speculates that Mies was led to his style by the desire to express the industrial character of our time and, second, by a desire to create buildings of pure architecture—an architecture that expresses the essence of building, in the manner and materials of the day. The personally expressive, the stylish, the influence of “aesthetic speculators” had to be stripped away to let the essential building of the 20th century shine through.

Schulze claims that Mies’s interest in essences came from his reading of St. Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher whom Mies would quote on occasion. Thomas, Schulze claims, expressed a system in which “essences” overarch the material world, and Mies saw his work as a reaching for these essences. Mies believed that if he removed the particular from a building, it would come closer to incorporating the essence of building. Aquinas, however, asserts exactly the opposite: that only through the particular does essence reveal itself. In a building, essence is known not by how the building is conceived, nor even by how it appears, but by what it does: as Hopkins put it, What I do is me. And it is precisely in the doing that Mies’s buildings fail.

Schulze, who is an honest critic, does not disguise the impractical nature of Mies’s work. Only Mies could build a house in the Fox River Valley of Illinois (the Farnsworth House) and not include screens to keep out the mosquitoes and flies. Only Mies could build an art gallery (the National Gallery in Berlin) and not include walls upon which to hang the paintings. Who else but Mies could design a building of glass that denies natural light to the people who work there (the post office of the Federal Center, Chicago)?

Mies’s buildings not only fail in practical terms, they also fail to fulfill a public purpose. As Philip Bess, a Chicago architect and critic, has noted, public architecture must give public expression to the logic of the institutions that commission it. If this is not done, both the building and institution are the weaker for it: The building is deprived of the personality that the institution would bestow on it, and the institution is deprived of a way to announce its mission—and be reminded of it. For example, a cathedral serves both as a pronouncement of the faith to nonbelievers and a reminder of the faith to believers. By contrast, Mies’s chapel on the IIT campus must be labeled “Chapel” to be distinguished from any of his other buildings. In truth, the only essence Mies’s buildings express is that of solipsism.

It is clear that in Thomistic terms, Mies’s “essential” buildings should not be called buildings at all. Rather, Mies built a weird kind of walk-through sculpture that, almost by accident, happens to be marginally habitable. In eliminating the influence of “aesthetic speculators,” Mies appears to have minimized the importance of the users of his buildings and discounted their needs or desires wherever they conflicted with his art. It is noteworthy that Mies’s most successful building, the Barcelona Pavilion, had literally no function whatever—it was meant to be walked through and admired, and nothing else.

These problems would be tolerable if Mies were just one architect among many; however, he has been tremendously influential. His sculptures do reflect the influence of industry; they do appear quite “modern,” smooth, machine-like, orderly, rational. Ours is also a time that values excessively the notions of idealism and historicism—in that sense, Mies is quite expressive of the spirit of the day. You cannot ignore Ludwig Mies when you must work in one of his sculptures or pay taxes to support one or see a classic building razed to make way for one. I know of no other artist who has so many victims—no other word is appropriate.

Inevitably, the reaction to Mies set in even before his death. The true catastrophe, however, is that debate in architectural circles, whether for Mies or against him, is still on his terms. By and large, architects still assume that “building alone matters” and that true architecture must embody the Zeitgeist. There is considerable discussion about just what the Geist of the Zeit is and how best to express it; there is even some uneasiness about the sterility of contemporary architecture; but few seem aware that the assumptions that underlie the discussion are wrong. This failure of thought has gone a long way toward destroying our cities.

Michael Mies, the architect’s father, insisted on building for God. Michael Mies’s God was much more literal—and more human—than Ludwig Mies’s spirit. Only when we cease to follow Mies van der Robe creating for “spirit” and “essence,” and instead heed Michael Mies and create for God and for man, will we begin once again truly to build.

 

[Mies van der Robe: A Critical Biography, by Franz Schulze; Chicago: University of Chicago Press]