Mies van der Rohe: The Unabridged Version

Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Franz Schulze

The summer art season of 2001 will enter the history books strongly identified with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), the modernist architect whose work is featured in a pair of huge exhibitions that opened in New York in June. "Mies in Berlin" was organized and shown at the Museum of Modern Art, while "Mies in America," produced by Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Both shows travel internationally well into 2002.

This is hardly the first time Mies has been celebrated on a large scale in this country. MOMA assembled two major retrospectives, in 1947 and 1986, and the Art Institute of Chicago put one together in 1968. And while both of the current shows are monumental in their coverage and documentation, nothing is more interesting about them than the views they take of themselves and the image they project of Mies, compared to the attitudes on those subjects that were adopted in previous exhibitions by previous generations.

The opening sentence in the catalogue of "Mies in America" speaks of Mies as a "profound thinker, inspired artist, and one of the greatest architects in history."[1] That kind of hagiographic writing would probably have found support from the organizers of the 1947, 1968 and 1986 shows but not from some observers of the last of the three, which transpired when postmodernism with its largely antimodernist attitude was enjoying widespread popularity [see A.i.A., Apr. 86]. Meanwhile, the co-organizers of "Mies in Berlin"--MOMA's chief curator of architecture, Terence Riley, and Columbia University professor Barry Bergdoll--have their own opinion about Mies and the exhibition they have supervised. Claiming a "revisionist" point of view, they are critical of the outlook of the late Arthur Drexler, who oversaw the 1986 show and who, they argue in their catalogue preface, treated Mies's German and American careers "as the seamless creation of a detached master architect." Drexler, they go on to say, "was little troubled by the tumultuous political, economic, and social upheavals that divided and characterized the two periods."[2] The implication awaiting the reader/viewer is that the "Mies in Berlin" catalogue and show will "un-detach" Mies by placing him in a context broader than a strictly formalist one.

Clearly, over time there has been a wide variety of often conflicting interpretations and evaluations of the architect. Nor does the list stop with the above. Robert Venturi was the chief spokesman for a viewpoint that anticipated the postmodernist critique when he turned Mies's famous aphorism on its head: "Less," Venturi said, "is a bore."[3] Moreover, although there is little sympathy among the Miesians today for the opinion of Edith Farnsworth (who commissioned Mies to design her house but quarreled vehemently with the great man before it was completed), she was a literate, highly cultivated, liberally educated woman who had reasons more fair-minded than biased for referring to him in her memoirs as a "medieval peasant."[4] Even when she was on cordial terms with him, she found his personal behavior rough and ungallant, and while she wrote at length about him, admiring his ability as an architect, she had little to say about his intellect and in no way suggested that she regarded him as a "profound thinker."

In short, anyone who visits the two exhibitions and or consults the catalogues might be well advised to remember that history's fickleness is largely traceable to critics writing with a certainty proportionate to the prejudices of their times. Nevertheless, with that much said, there are some virtually ironclad reasons to believe that these two exhibitions and their accompanying texts will be securely regarded among the most important contributions to modern architectural history in general and Miesian scholarship in particular. To some degree the evidence for this is quantitative. The sheer amount of information provided on the walls of the shows and in the pages of the catalogues surpasses anything offered anywhere up to now.

"Mies in Berlin" begins at the beginning--and in a sense earlier. The first images displayed are drawings and prints of work by architects who influenced or were in some way related to the preferences of the young Mies. Here the 19th-century Romantic Classicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel, beloved by German architects, especially at the turn of the 20th century, figures heavily, accompanied by others like the still earlier Classicist Friedrich Gilly, along with Mies's onetime boss Peter Behrens; the Dutchman he greatly admired, Hendrik Berlage; and the American he watched with focused care, Frank Lloyd Wright. A section devoted to Mies prior to World War I follows, documenting works whose traditional, nonmodernist character may partly explain why they have never before been covered so thoroughly and respectfully. Until now, only cursory attention has been paid to Mies's very first building, the Riehl House of 1907, a neo-Biedermeier residence completed in Potsdam when its designer was 21. It was granted a special place in MOMA's first gallery, enhanced by a digital tour of its interior spaces. In addition to the exhibits given over to the house are, most notably, drawings and models of two unbuilt projects palpably indebted to the Classicistic manner of Schinkel: the 1910 monument to Otto von Bismarck, meant for the western bank of the Rhine River at Bingen, and the grandiose Kroller-Muller House (1911-12), intended for Wassenaar, near The Hague.