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Regarding Mies (2001) The current tsunami of Mies van der Rohe revisionism unleashed in innumerable books, symposia, and exhibitions is so unforgiving that subtle gestures at the edges of the storm may go totally unnoticed. These gestures are the elusive, cunning, shadowy and somehow more satisfying readings of Mies that are understated and highly elliptical. Two such unorthodox volumes, Looking for Mies, by Ricardo Daza (Barcelona/Basel: Actar/Birkhauser, 2000) and Fear of Glass - Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion in Barcelona, by Josep Quetglas (Barcelona/Basel: Actar/Birkhauser, 2001), place Mies and his oeuvre in the context of his own times and subjectivity that he tried desperately to erase. Quetglas' book is a superb unveiling of the mythic Mies. It strips away layers of historical interpretation and misinterpretation to reveal a Barcelona Pavilion (1929) that is a "virtual mirror" and a problematic expression of the separation of art (and architecture) from life itself. Quetglas enumerates the various aesthetic games indulged by Mies, countering the usual presentation of Mies as the supreme master of both modern architectonics and neo-plasticism. He takes the iconic pavilion to pieces and examines each fragment for traces of a larger cultural presence, Weimar Germany. In the Pavilion he finds the embodiment of a "tragic performance", or the "modern house performed as tragedy". He detects, not surprisingly, in its mythic stature echoes of the 1927 Werkbund Crystal Palace at Stuttgart, the 1914 Glass House at Cologne by Bruno Taut, and the 1901 Darmstadt Artists' Colony by Peter Behrens (Mies' mentor), the latter being where the "myth of glass received its most formal declaration." This "glass chain" -- 1901, 1914, 1927, 1929 -- places Mies' masterpiece solidly amid the troubled times of the Weimar Republic and demolishes the idea of an architectural quantum leap. Quetglas also finds in the Barcelona Pavilion what Daza finds in Crown Hall at ITT (1950-56), in Looking for Mies, a very amusing detective story that takes a single famous 1956 photo of Mies (by Bill Engdahl for Architectural Forum) and unearths its exact location within the building by way of excruciatingly precise logic and inference, while at the same time deciphering the manner and repose of the architect himself (sartorially resplendent in his black Knize suit and gazing off into space puffing on a Montecristo cigar). Both books provide further detail of what has long been known, that Mies constructed (edited) his own image as carefully as he did his buildings. Nevertheless, both the Barcelona Pavilion and Mies have been reduced over time to an abstract essence that does not stand up to forensic scholarship. Daza and Quetglas uncover the facts of the matter by analyzing the remains -- the reputation, the building plans, photographs and conflicting tales and memories. Quetglas counters the formalist claim to the Barcelona Pavilion through a masterful disquisition on a building that has also been wrongly presented as an ode to free-flowing space; a building that is, after all, according to Quetglas, strictly delimited on a podium 'decorated' with a fabulously thin layer of travertine (over Catalan arches), based on the ground plan of a Doric temple, and precisely "contained by geometry" such that the illusion of space is in fact an extraordinary gesture turned in upon itself. Mies also removed the doors whenever the photographers showed up. The Pavilion, in fact, stages "obstinate closure or even autism", a "segregated, closed space, defined only in terms of horizontal planes, in which vertical lines are trapped". Mies back filled this autistic enclosure with rich veneers of chrome, onyx, ebony, silk and marble to provide a blurry surface that dispels the optical willfulness of the Pavilion. (Mies, it seems, always sketched his projects in one-point perspective.) Apparently the Barcelona Pavilion is neither a precise rationalist structure nor an ode to freedom but, instead, something hopelessly stranded in virtual reality. The shadow of Frank Lloyd Wright falls over the idea of this 'house' but fails to register. Mies is uninterested in connecting the building to life or site. It stands apart, aloof, alone and empty. The visitor enters and stages his/her own dissolution in a house of mirrors. Quetglas identifies the eight pillars within as "machines for compartmentalizing space" and goes on to show that both the Pavilion and Villa Tugendhat (1930) contained the same reverence for demarcating and privileging the interior and zones within that interior. Mies used water in the Barcelona Pavilion to essentially erase this incipient, totalizing structural order. Today this trick would be dismissed as "scenography". Both books are suspense-driven tales that conclude with spectacular findings that cannot be disclosed without destroying the potential pleasure of the reader. Suffice to say that Daza and Quetglas both find in Mies a very clever artisan who carefully crafted both self and work to conceal more than he revealed. The so-called rational clarity of his architectural production is the greatest myth of all. (Gavin Keeney - 2001) BIBLIOGRAPHY Looking for Mies - paper - ISBNs: 3-7643-6238-3 English / 3-7643-6239-1 German Fear of Glass - paper - ISBNs: 3-7643-6339-8 English / 3-7643-6340-8 German |
Landscape Agency New York - 2002/2004