ARTS Mies van der Rohe
STEPHEN GARDINER
'Today, as for a long time past, 1 believe that architecture has little or nothing to do with the invention ot interesting forms or with personal inclinations. True architec- ture is always objective and is the expres- sion of the inner structure of our time, from which it stems.'
Mies van der Rtihe wrote this as a preface for Werner Blaser's book on his work pub- lished in 1965. It is the architectural psy- chiatrist speaking—cool, remote, dispassion- ate. His words seem to rule out emotion and a great deal else that we enjoy. They give us the cold handshake and something of Germany wafts over with them. We freeze, as we freeze a little when we see his tall towers, his glass houses, his traver- tine—dazzling though his flawless façades and interiors certainly are. They have the touch of the ice-cube about them, flowing water that has been frozen to a pre- arranged shape at a precise and planned point in time, the quality perhaps of a precious ornament that we must not, dare not, handle because the object is so perfect and, in some way fragile.
Mies died just over a week ago at the age of eighty-three. He was the last of the famous trio of great modern architects: Frank Lloyd Wright died in the 'fifties, Le Cor- busier in 1965. All three were leaders, all had their followers, all in some way changed the look of the twentieth century, and all had their work debased by imitators. Few people probably realise, for instance, that the boarded walls and ceilings, the 'split levels' and so forth which have now reached the outer fringes of suburbia came originally from Wright; more, however, will probably acknowledge that the patterning of concrete with wooden shuttering—a craze which overtook England in the 'sixties and ended (one hopes) with the ludicrously mannered Hayward Gallery—emanates from Le Corbusier; and, finally, the glass facade-making in the office block business (which is basically the same thing as neo- Georgian, and run up by the same archi- tects using a different style with the same ease) is generally attributable to Mies. With the addition of a few crucial details—bronze mullions, for example, and tinted glass— quite a slick facsimile of his work can be produced. As an architect who has a large slice of the commercial work in London once said to me, 'Anyone can do Mies'.
Of course, this is nonsense, as a glance at a city skyline or a closer examination of some of the attempted copies will prove. The proportion, for instance, is usually wrong and the simple Miesian conception of a single slender glass object hovering just above the ground is almost always spoilt by a clutter of junk at the entrance level, or diminished by a profusion of other blocks—as at Euston—crowding it into insignificance. It is just not possible to 'do Mies' unless you accept that his rules are fundamental to the conception and that you follow them. You can go on from there: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill went on from there with the Lever Brothers tower in New York and an Englishman, the late Peter Dickinson. caught the spirit of Mies in a way unrivalled by anyone, except Mies himself, with his Bank of Commerce in Montreal.
But then these architects, in their faithful interpretation of the rules, will have recog- nised that there was far more to appreciate in Mies than a tall tower of a certain width and height, standing alone and made of a breath-taking mixture of stainless steel and tinted glass. To seize on that and imitate it would be as adolescent and disastrous as seizing on Matisse's last cut-outs as the inspiration for a life's work. In order to understand the later designs it is necessary to grasp the intellectual and imaginative development as a whole. With Mies, as with any other great artist, one must see what came before—before the Lake Shore apart- ments in Chicago and the Seagram Building in New York.
As early as 1910 Mies saw, in his twenties, that the rapid changes overtaking building and scientific techniques had to be exploited and disciplined within parallel movements in architecture. Art Nouveau had run dry and Lloyd Wright was already designing some marvellous houses. Cor- busier, on the other hand, hadn't yet arrived. From the start, Mies seems to have been concerned with two vital factors. One was his belief that it must be possible to create a harmony between old and new buildings and so extend (and not break) the straight line of true architecture into the twentieth century, quite naturally; and secondly, he clearly saw in new engineering a freedom of opportunity that had never been known before and which, if handled properly with care and perception, could provide people with far happier surround- ings.
Neither of these ambitions was obviously easy to achieve, and I think that his flat and icy explanations of what he was trying to do were more an expression of the diffi- culties involved than of his own personality. At any rate, these two areas of thought appear to have dominated his work through- out his life. From the beginning, in his earliest projects, he used and loved glass, for example, and glass is a neutral material which, if treated simply and without fuss, can stand quietly, but with authority, in any setting without causing a disturbance. But it is also a precise material—polished. shiny, sharp—that can make a beautiful mirror for anything from a city to the trees and grass of countryside.
So, in 1920, we see those lovely char- coal drawings for glass skyscrapers and houses. But we see, too, his free experiments with structure that always enabled the glass to be expressed for what it was—infill or non-bearing wall surfaces on a huge scale. In rapid succession he tried out numerous projects using concrete for cantilevers and frames, brick walls as separate and uninter- rupted planes that supported roofs at critical points; he then went on to the delicate little cruciform chromium plated columns of the Barcelona Pavilion, in 1929, where the walls of onyx became non-structural screens to shape space—Mies sought to guide people rather than to inflict himself and his per-. sonality upon them. After that he interested himself in the courtyard plan, a form which he liked for the privacy, light and ventila- tion it offered, and he designed some streets in this manner that had a curious resemb- lance to the sort of thing the Greeks did in 200 BC.
But when the Germans lost him to America in the mid-Ifni-ties, he started applying his theories to really big schemes at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1938_ 58)—where the Crown Hall (1953), with its huge overhead beams and fragile glass ele- vations, was possibly the finest large con- struction he ever made. Of his smaller works, I suppose the Farnsworth house (1950) remains most clearly in the mind. Both this and the Crown Hall were doing much the same thing—lifting the structure out of the way above the roof so that the glass envelope could melt away or reflect as it wished. At Farnsworth, certainly, all dissolves except the steel frame which hovers like a skeleton above the flat field and against the background of trees. This tiny house, floating in its green setting, accomplished all he set out to do in 1910. He created his harmony, and he did it with steel and glass. He was a disciplinarian whose ideal was freedom. There could be no better epitaph for Mies than his own saying: 'Less is more'
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