Outside the Box - Mies and Mies Not (2001)
"A battlefield on which you don't see the undercurrents of history doesn't show enough of the truth." -- Salman Rushdie
The current rehabilitation of Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) is taking place both in the academies of architecture and in the galleries of modern art. The MoMA and Whitney exhibitions are just the more impressive bloom of a sustained (re)efflorescence after several decades of sustained criticism of Mies by proponents of both postmodernism (reactionary forms of late-modernism) and the radical, unbending shock troops of true avant-gardism (e.g., Manfredo Tafuri). This battle royale is now coming to an apotheosis in the canonization of Mies by the unrepentant neo-modernist cadre (the hard-core) always-already in love with his selective presentation of himself and the architectural world's creative editing of both his work and his influence. This latter editing had perhaps no greater patron than MoMA itself, and so it is with amusement and caritas that we pony up $10 to see the process of rehabilitation performed in the white boxes of the Manhattan institution that is itself now undergoing a very public rehabilitation. (It seems that to be the museum of modern art you have to redefine the words 'modern' and 'art' from time to time.) This double rehabilitation is perfectly at peace with the doubling of everything else that is well underway in the present-day, cultural-economic landscape -- e.g., the perpetration of simulacra upon simulacra that ultimately disguises and obscures the source of anomie generated in the first place by the very institutions self-appointed to anoint and represent the wondrous works of the art and architectural establishment. Needless to say, this vicious cycle is heedlessly self-fulfilling.
Oh MoMA!
It is with unease then that one approaches the galleries at MoMA to partake in this feast of Miesian pot-au-feu. The escalators are full and the entries crammed with the innocent subjects of this very public re-indoctrination. But wiggle free and indulge your appetite, for this is a blockbuster event on the same scale as Monet or Picasso retrospectives. The work on display covers the years of Mies' ascendancy, from around 1910 till the late 1930s. (The Whitney picks up where MoMA leaves off ... It is a one-two knockout punch from a two-headed heavyweight.* And be prepared to take a break between consciousness and unconsciousness. Before you blackout, however, make a few notes to yourself - for, when you recover from your coma, you will want to remind yourself that you have been savagely pummeled in the name of officially-sanctioned and promulgated-from-on-high modern art and architecture.) Caveat emptor.
Mies came of age in an age that was falling to pieces. His early works are romantic-neoclassicist set pieces influenced by Schinkel and staged in post-Bismarck and Weimar Germany. It is not till the approach of WWII that Mies gets a shove from the zeitgeist and moves on up to the realm of avenging architectural angels, and much of this shove seems to have come from a connection to second-wave dadaism (debased dadaism), in Berlin, plus an as-yet-undisclosed plagiarism of Brno (Czech) functionalism.
The shift from his romantic houses and villas to putative 'radical' works occurred around 1920 when Ludwig Mies reinvented (renamed) himself Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The projects up to this point were highly architectonic compositions with highly architectonic gardens and sweeping gestures to landscape and sky. Several monuments attest to an incipient sense of the grandiose that is later played out in his skyscrapers. The first skyscraper project (1921) for a triangular site on the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin is evident in later high-rise Miesian visions that have a spurious connection to the utopian proposals of Bruno Taut and other left-leaning, radical chic architects of that moment. Brushing up against dada, in the shape of a 'collegium' formed around the publication G (Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, Theo van Doesburg), Mies acquired a small measure of useful ideology that found expression in the proto-brutalist projects of the early 1920s, when he was experimenting with horizontal slabs of raw concrete in the form of office blocks (1923) and country houses. He switched back and forth between brick and concrete for awhile, shape-shifting, and, in 1926 produced the very raw Monument to the November Revolution, in Berlin, commemorating the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and fellow travelers in the Spartakusbund, an extreme-left band of utopian socialists. This monument (actually built) was constructed out of salvaged brick and carried the words "Ich bin, Ich war, Ich werde sein" (I am, I was, I will be) plus a star, hammer and sickle. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.
Mies surfed the trends of the 1920s and, thus, his production in the Weimar period is uneven and even haphazard. The siteless quality of his work increased as he veered off into theory and pseudo-avant-garde posturing. He had a Werkbund mode, a Functionalist mode, a Hugh Ferris utopian mode and he dabbled in the "biotechnic" and "biocentric" determinism of the Berlin dada/De Stijl agitation. He was dismissed by Gropius when he tried to gain premature recognition in 1923 as one the "unknown architects" at the Bauhaus exhibition of the same name, ironically later to become the last director (1929-33) of that now august institution. (Despite these connections, one can hardly imagine Mies lunching with Johannes Itten, much less performing at the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich in the last years of WWI.) He was promiscuous in the sense that he was ambivalent regarding the political content of architectural production. His now controversial participation in the 1934 invited competition for the German Pavilion at Brussels attests to this promiscuity. (The unsubstantiated rumor repeated by MoMA wall text that his drawings ended up on the floor of Hitler's chancellery is without meaning given that he did participate and his drawings included the "recommended" Nazi eagle and swastika.) The MoMA wall text exceeds expectations on this point (is clever by more than a half): "Display of the new regime's symbols, the eagle and the swastika, were not left to the architect's judgement but were strongly recommended in the brief." Yes, but if he was known to have designed the Monument to the November Revolution was it a tremendous stretch to expect to be thrown to the wolves in this later competition? Did he have to accept the invitation to participate? Was he set up? Did he have to utilize the "recommended" symbols? No, No, Maybe, No.
Image (left) - Spilberk Castle, Brno1928-30 are Mies years of triumph, with construction of both the Barcelona Pavilion (1928-29) and Villa Tugendhat (1928-30), the latter in the suburbs of Brno (Czechoslovakia). Both are now canonical works much worked over by pundits and curators of modern architecture et passim. These two projects alone might have secured Mies' reputation, and, no doubt, played no small role in his invitation to the U.S. in 1937 by Alfred Barr and Philip Johnson (both then holding forth at MoMA). The Barcelona Pavilion alone has gone down in history as an extreme formalist exercise and has only recently come to be understood as an amalgam of the forces at play in the period of its construction (and subsequent demolition). Villa Tugendhat is a more difficult number to evaluate because it has been rotated in the architectural imagination so many times that its site and its relative significance have all but vanished in the onslaught of high valorization. This is the Mies villa that Karel Teige famously trashed (verbally, but one can picture him on a rampage through its overly precious interior as well, in a Richard Payne Knight inspired act of vandalism). Notably, there are two pictures of this iconic villa presented at MoMA, from 1930 and 2000. In the older of the two the somewhat sinister Spilberk castle in Brno is visible through the breezeway. In the latter image the view is occluded by trees, the very subject (i.e., nature) magnificently excised by the typical formalist interpretation and presentation of this work of high architecture. The trees have returned, so to speak, in a psycho-dynamic sense, after seventy years of repression. They have in the process obscured the clear, cold precision of the purported design parti and covered up the view to the notorious, albeit accidentally significant Spilberk castle. The Barcelona Pavilion has suffered the same fate of over-interpretation and despite its recent re-creation has little chance of ever being seen objectively (in spite of all the contextual illustrative material included at MoMA).
This very process of valorization and proscription is the excise tax, the surcharge levied on the mediated imagination of the thinking public. The thinking public, alas, will buy both the clever re-representation of Mies plus some of the trinkets in the gift nooks at MoMA as a touchstone for this terribly biased, somewhat ludicrous rehash of an architect that may have produced a mere handful of buildings to make the pigeons coo. (Gavin Keeney - 1479 words)
* The referee in this heavyweight competition, Columbia University School of Architecture, clearly in on the romp from the starting bell, will orchestrate a symposium on Saturday, September 8 from 10:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. with a stellar lineup of architectural pundits and Miesian apologists.
BIBLIOGRAPHYMies in Berlin (MoMA)
Mies in America (The Whitney)
Mies in Berlin (New York: Abrams, 2001)
Anyone trying to get a grip on the rehabilitation of Mies should read the book, edited by Detlef Mertins, The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994). Plus, take a look at two newish books from Birkhauser: 1/ Fear of Glass (Basel: Birkhauser, 2001), by Josep Quetglas; and 2/ Looking for Mies (Basel: Birkhauser/Actar, 2000), by Ricardo Daza. Another text, from Lisbon-based publisher Editorial Blau, is a very complex number by Yehuda E. Safran, Mies van der Rohe (Lisbon: Blau, 2000). The MoMA catalogue Mies In Berlin contains a remarkably frank essay by Barry Bergdoll on the suppression of landscape in the early presentation of Mies (by MoMA) as architectural wunderkind.
See Regarding Mies for a review of Fear of Glass and Looking for Mies.
POSTSCRIPT
Martin Filler's perceptive remarks on the Thomas Ruff photographs that accompanied the Mies in Berlin exhibition at MoMA (as below) underscore the absent center of architectural ontology, i.e., the political. MoMA all but ignored Mies' politics and even suggested by association that he was a socialist or communist. Mies' quest for the Absolute blinded him to the encoded ideology of architecture. His work has clear sublimations of such, but, when you look closely, the ideology is not quite so well repressed.
"The series comprises pictures of Mies buildings that Ruff either took himself or digitally manipulated from appropriated photos. His propulsive, horizontally blurred portrait of the rebuilt Barcelona Pavilion was inspired, he has explained, by his notion of that building as a locomotive of modernism. This image is a brilliant distillation of Mies's masterpiece, and what Ruff's representation lacks in formal accuracy it more than makes up for in spiritual fidelity to the architect's dynamic vision.
In another compelling picture, Ruff started with an old photo of Mies's Afrikanische Strasse Municipal Housing of 1926-1927 in the Wedding section of Berlin, super-imposing the name of the development and a flotilla of airplanes over the original picture. That eerie montage stimulates multiple associations, from the saturation bombing of the German capital at the end of World War II to the Berlin Airlift a few years later. The regimented formation of the aircraft also echoes the stiffly ranked Mies apartment houses below them, a pointed criticism of the architect's penchant for an almost militaristic sense of order.
Another allusive work depicts Mies's apartment block of 1926-1927 at the Werkbund housing exhibition in Stuttgart (for which he also served as artistic director and head of planning). Ruff gave the windows of the severe, flat-roofed dwelling the same copper-mirrored coloration as the glass on the former East German parliament building in Berlin: this is the photographer's warning against the totalitarian dangers that are implicit in utopian planning. This consistently engaging series of photographs is the most provocative use of contemporary art to amplify a historical architecture exhibition that I have ever beheld."
-- Martin Filler, "Mies and the Mastodon" (The New Republic, 08/06/01)
Mies in London (The Guardian Unlimited, 11/30/02)
