Art: Mies van der Rohe: Disciplinarian for a Confused Age

LOOK up—and anywhere in the U.S. the building, if it is relatively new, and certainly if it is of steel, will bear traces of Mies van der Rohe. In a time of confusion, he was a purist. In an era of innovation, he was a disciplinarian. He found shapes for the new possibilities of glass and steel, and the architecture of the world has never been the same since. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who died in Chicago last week at the age of 83, never realized the extent of his fame. “It is bad to be too famous,” he once remarked. “Greek temples, Roman basilicas arid medieval cathedrals are significant to us as creations of a whole epoch rather than as works of individual architects. Who asks for the names of these builders?”

Succeeding generations will know Mies’ name, and perhaps even apply it to the epoch. Mies laid down a fundamental creed of honest structure. Skin-and-bones architecture, he called it. Born in 1886 in Aachen, Germany, he received no formal architectural education. But he learned from his father, a master stonemason, to value the particular heft and quality of pure materials. One of his first jobs consisted of designing stucco ornaments for a local architect—”full-size details of Louis XIV in the morning, Renaissance in the afternoon.” The experience left him with a lasting disdain for the falseness of decoration and a lasting relish for the honesty of materials. His buildings sprang from them, not from any abstract notion of forms.

Glass Prototype. He considered glass, and in 1919 designed a 20-story all-glass office tower for Berlin which, though never built, is the admitted prototype of all the great glass-and-metal skyscrapers that followed. He considered concrete, and in 1922 designed an office building with the continuous strip windows that are now a near cliche. He considered the room as a planning unit and concluded that it could be dispensed with, proving his contention in his famed German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. Since then, his low buildings have been characterized by a single floating roof, their spaces divided by freestanding, often movable walls that became the essential unit of his interior planning.

His favorite of these was the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Crown Hall, where the giant, 220-ft.-wide roof, suspended on four trusses, hovers almost weightlessly over the huge inner space.

The Barcelona pavilion, a low-slung one-story jewel brilliantly combining such elegant materials as travertine, Tinian marble, gray glass, onyx and steel, was Mies’ first major public building to demonstrate many of these concepts. It immediately established its designer as a master. The following year he replaced Walter Gropius as the director of the Dessau Bauhaus, only to close up the experimental workshop three years later in protest against Nazi restrictions. In 1938, an invitation to head the school of architecture at the Armour Institute (since renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology) led Mies to Chicago and the full flowering of his genius. “He always said he would have created the same things if he had stayed in Germany,” says Mies’ grandson, Architect Dirk Lohan, “but personally I believe that the special climate and pace of Chicago helped him to create what he did.”

“God in Details.” Very probably it did. With its assortment of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, the city was certainly receptive to architectural innovations. For its part, the institute not only gave Mies free rein to organize his school but asked him to design a 22-building complex for its campus. In the years that followed, Mies designed dozens of landmark structures in cities around the world, each distinguished by structural economy, elegant materials and an absolute perfection of detail. “God is in the details,” Mies would say, and he spared no pains to achieve that perfection.

When no existing furniture quite matched the modern grandeur of his Barcelona pavilion, he designed his own tables, stools and chairs in leather, steel and glass—which have since become classics in themselves. For Manhattan’s Seagram Building, in its muted bronze and pink-glass majesty the country’s most handsome office building, he had a mock-up made of the bronze mullions that hold the vertical windows in place. They are H-shaped in cross section, and Mies elaborately studied the dimensions of their outer edge for the shadow line it would cast on the enclosed windows and how it would relate to the whole 38-floor-high vertical scale. An added ith of an inch, translated into bronze, projected to the building’s full height, and multiplied by all the mullions involved, might mean added thousands of dollars in construction costs. Mies was unintimidated. As one of his friends said recently, he insisted on simplicity, no matter what it cost.

He was equally demanding of the building’s occupants. Each day, as darkness falls, all the ceiling lights in the Seagram offices automatically turn on at a set intensity, so that the building will stand against Manhattan’s evening skyline just as Mies planned that it should. Similarly, any tenant moving into his apartment houses on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive has to accept the gray fiberglass curtains that Mies specified for their floor-to-ceiling windows. A bon vivant who enjoyed fine-tailored suits, gourmet food, and huge cigars, Mies once contemplated moving into his own building, then decided to remain in his oldfashioned, high-ceilinged apartment nearby. Visitors there found it characteristically spartan, decorated simply with black leather settees and easy chairs and a superb collection of Paul Klee’s paintings lining the white walls.

The Most Good. “At its best, architecture touches and expresses the very innermost structure of the civilization from which it springs,” Mies said. “I have tried to make an architecture for a technological society. I have wanted to keep everything reasonable and clear —to have an architecture that anybody can do.” To a large extent, he succeeded. Summarizing his achievement in a speech some time ago, Architect Philip Johnson said: “Le Corbusier invents, invents magnificently and, as at Ronchamps, makes a new shape of monument for the world to admire. Mies purifies and purifies till, as at Seagram, he makes the paradigm for America’s tall building. I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good,’ he liked to say. Ronchamps is more amazing; Wright’s Guggenheim far more extraordinary; but the Seagram Building may perhaps be the most ‘good.’ ”

In one sense, Mies was in a state of momentary eclipse at his death. His lessons by now have been so absorbed into architectural thought that the young have often felt impatient at the Mies formulas, the “less is more,” the implicitly arrogant demand to produce something more spare, more pure. Mies’ discipline is demanding, and except in his hands, a confining one. No one can build a better Seagram Building. And by its very austerity, Mies’ esthetic provides no vocabulary for a whole city landscape—a topic that obsesses most young architects, who talk not of individual buildings but of “reshaping the urban environment.” A city, or even an avenue lined with Seagram Buildings would be a desolation.

Austere Standard. Mies’ vocabulary is one of yes and no, of the perfect and the imperfect. There is little room for adjectives or adverbs, and in the face of this unrelenting demand, lesser architects boggle or, refusing the challenge completely, invent a different vocabulary of their own.

Mies’ death closed one of architecture’s more glorious chapters. Along with Frank Lloyd Wright, the arch individualist who pioneered an organic approach to space, Le Corbusier, the daring gambler with expressive form, and Walter Gropius, the dogged exponent of functionalism—all dead now—he had shaped the buildings of the 20th century. Whoever successive generations may follow, or aspire to emulate, they must take Mies into account. He set down principles and raised standards for construction from which there can be no retreat.