Mies van der Rohe: The Unabridged Version

Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Franz Schulze

The ensuing section, "Space and Structure," deals with the designs of the 1940s, in which Mies explored the factors leading to the development of "universal space," customarily defined as a space large and unimpeded enough to accommodate a variety of functions, even those that might change with the years. Small though it is, the Farnsworth House was the seminal work of this type. Built in Plano, Ill., between 1946 and 1951, it consists of a single interior space surrounding a utility core, with both elements enclosed by a roof slab, a floor slab, eight supporting columns and floor-to-ceiling walls of glass.

Soon enough Mies would expand the size of his open-spaced buildings, but the show offers the reminder that the 1940s were also given over to the design and completion of the architect's first high-rise buildings. Chief among these were the twin apartment buildings at 860-880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago (1948-51), steel-framed structures with skins made entirely of glass. The facades are animated by the use of mullions in the form of I-beams, a device that Mies used over and over in his American work.

It was, in fact, so dear to his heart that he applied it in bronze on the surface of the Seagram Building (1954-58) in New York City. A metal of such historic elegance was available to him due to the unusually comfortable budget he enjoyed, which also enabled him to use comparably patrician materials throughout the interior. No less important to the success of the Seagram Building was Mies's decision to set the structure's lofty tower back 90 feet from the Park Avenue sidewalk. The resultant plaza not only adds to the visibility of the building but provides a strikingly urbanistic accent to midtown Manhattan. Although most admirers of Mies regard the Seagram Building as the finest of his high-rises, one of the Whitney exhibition's wall labels cites an opinion of the New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp to the startling effect that the Seagram is the most important building of the last millennium. Such a view is likely to stop more than a few viewers in their tracks, as they begin to click off the competition (Angkor Wat, the cathedral at Chartres, Michelangelo's Campidoglio, Vaux-le-Vicomte, etc.--each with a persuasive rationale), ending the exercise, one hopes, before they actually undervalue the very building Muschamp singles out as worthy of such extravagant praise.

Fortunately, more follows in the CCA-Whitney show, primarily the exhibition's last category, which is confined to the clear-span structure. With this building type, Mies achieved the universal space he had hoped for. A differentiation is made between one-way spans supported by trusses (the 1952-53 Mannheim National Theater project) or web girders (the 1950-56 IIT Architecture and Institute of Design Building, S.R. Crown Hall), and two-way spans that feature an evenly gridded roof (the enormous 720-foot-square Chicago Convention Hall project of 1953-54).

The show allots an entire gallery to the last two-way span pavilion Mies designed, the Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie, a museum finished in 1968, a year before he died. This is clearly viewed by the organizers as the show's piece de resistance. A model stands in the center of a darkened room, with a huge screen behind it that displays a video made by the designer of the Whitney exhibition, artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle. The film, titled Alltagszeit (In Ordinary Time), features 20 people who at the request of Manglano-Ovalle moved through the space of the Nationalgalerie for 12 hours, from dawn to dusk. It can be viewed in far shorter order, of course, since much of it is presented in the 16-minute video as time-lapse photography. It is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Jeremy Boyle. Dense, not to say gloomy, this last component seems curiously inappropriate to the cleanly conceived and well-photographed building it is meant to salute.