Mies van der Rohe the built work by Krohn, Carsten (z-lib.org)

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Mies Van der rohe

the built work

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birkhäuser basel

Mies Van der rohe the built work

Carsten krohn

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Layout, cover design and typography:

Annette Kern, Hamburg

Copy editing and project management:

Henriette Mueller-Stahl, Berlin

Translation from German into English:

Julian Reisenberger, Weimar

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A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the German National Lib- rary. The German National Library lists this publication in the Deut- sche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

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Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Germany

ISBN 978–3–0346–0740–7 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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We kindly thank FSB Franz Schneider Brakel GmbH+Co KG for their support.

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table oF Contents Introduction

Riehl House

Neubabelsberg, Germany, 1908

Perls House

Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany, 1911–12

Kröller-Müller House, Façade Mock-up Wassenaar, Netherlands, 1912–13

Werner House

Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany, 1912–13

Warnholtz House

Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany, 1914–15

Urbig House

Neubabelsberg, Germany, 1915–17

Tombstone for Laura Perls Berlin-Weißensee, Germany, 1919

Kempner House

Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany, 1921–23

Eichstaedt House

Berlin-Nikolassee, Germany, 1921–23

Feldmann House

Berlin-Grunewald, Germany, 1921–23

Ryder House

Wiesbaden, Germany, 1923–27

Gymnasium for Frau Butte’s Private School Potsdam, Germany, 1924–25

Mosler House

Neubabelsberg, Germany, 1924–26

Urban House, Conversion

Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany, 1924–26

Housing on the Afrikanische Straße Berlin-Wedding, Germany, 1925–27

Wolf House

Guben, Poland, 1925–27

Monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg Berlin-Lichtenberg, Germany, 1926

Weißenhofsiedlung Apartment Block Stuttgart, Germany, 1926–27

Glass Room

Stuttgart, Germany, 1927

Samt und Seide Café (Velvet and Silk Café) Berlin, Germany, 1927

Fuchs Gallery, Addition to the Perls House Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany, 1927–28

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102

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111

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118

120

121

122

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Lange and Esters Houses Krefeld, Germany, 1927–30

Barcelona Pavilion

International Exposition, Barcelona, Spain, 1928–29

German Electrical Industry Pavilion World Exposition, Barcelona, Spain, 1929

Tugendhat House

Brno, Czech Republic, 1928–30

Henke House, Addition Essen, Germany, 1930

Verseidag Factory

Krefeld, Germany, 1930–31, 1935

Model House for the Berlin Building Exposition Berlin, Germany, 1931

Trinkhalle (Refreshment Stand) Dessau, Germany, 1932

Lemke House

Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, Germany, 1932–33

Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, USA, 1941–58

Minerals and Metals Research Building

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA, 1941–43, 1956–58

Engineering Research Building

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA, 1943–46

Perlstein Hall

Alumni Memorial Hall

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA, 1945–46

Wishnick Hall

Central Vault

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA, 1946

Institute of Gas Technology Building

Association of American Railroads Research Laboratory Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA, 1948–50

Boiler Plant

Chapel

Test Cell

Mechanics Research Building

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148

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182

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Crown Hall

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA, 1950–56

IIT Halls of Residence

Association of American Railroads Mechanical Laboratory Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA, 1952–53

Commons Building

Electrical Engineering and Physics Building

Association of American Railroads Engineering Laboratory Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA, 1955–57

Siegel Hall

Farnsworth House

Plano, Illinois, USA, 1945–51

Promontory Apartments Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1946–49

Algonquin Apartments

Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1948–50

Arts Club of Chicago

860–880 Lake Shore Drive Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1948–51

McCormick House

Elmhurst, Illinois, USA, 1951–52

Greenwald House

Weston, Connecticut, USA, 1951–56

Commonwealth Promenade Apartments Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1953–57

Esplanade Apartments

Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1953–57

Seagram Building New York, USA, 1954–58

Lafayette Park

Detroit, Michigan, USA, 1955–58

Colonnade and Pavilion Apartments Newark, New Jersey, USA, 1958–60

Bacardi Office Building Mexico City, Mexico, 1958–61

One Charles Center

Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 1958–62 Lafayette Towers

Detroit, Michigan, USA, 1959–63

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Federal Center

Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1959–74

Home Federal Savings and Loan Association Des Moines, Iowa, USA, 1960–63

2400 Lakeview

Highfield House

Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 1962–64

Social Service Administration

University of Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1962–64

Meredith Hall

Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, USA, 1962–65

Science Center

Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 1962–68

Neue Nationalgalerie

Berlin-Tiergarten, Germany, 1962–68

Toronto-Dominion Centre Toronto, Canada, 1963–69

Westmount Square

Montreal, Canada, 1964–68

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library Washington, D.C., USA, 1965–72

Museum of Fine Arts

Houston, Texas, USA, 1954–58, 1965–74

Nuns’ Island Apartments Montreal, Canada, 1966–69

IBM Building

Chicago, USA, 1966–72

111 East Wacker Drive

Service Station

Montreal, Canada, 1968 Subject Index

Illustration Credits Chronological Bibliography About the Author

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Over the past few years, I’ve often been asked: “A book about Mies – what more is there to say?” The idea for this project came about during a vision to the Colonnade and Pavilion Apartments in Newark, New Jersey, in October 2009. Several years earlier, an artist in New York showed me a Super 8 film of these buildings which I’d never heard of despite having read several books on the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and having studied for a while in New York. I was sceptical – perhaps Mies had acted simply as a consultant. Years later, on the occasion of a lecture I gave at Columbia University on urban utopias for Ber- lin, I decided to pay the buildings a visit. I was surprised to find the buildings were only 20 minutes by train from New York’s Penn Station. The two monumental slabs can be seen rising into the sky immediately behind Newark Broad Street Station in a district that has a reputation as being unsafe. I was immediately smit- ten by the view from the platform (see page 182, top): it was the built embodiment of the vision that Ludwig Hilberseimer, an urban planner and close collaborator of Mies, had elaborated in texts and images for Berlin. Only as I began to explore the complex did I properly comprehend its urban dimensions, which are defined by a third high-rise slab located some 600 metres further away. It was a stormy day and the thin panes of glass in the still original aluminium façade – designed in Mies’ office – vibrated with shivering reflections of the clouds.

In the 50 years since they were built, the profile of the resi- dents has shifted radically: originally built to house white mid- dle-class workers, it is now almost exclusively occupied by Af- rican American tenants. I asked the resident manager whether they received many architecturally interested visitors and was told that they had one visitor last year. The complex is evidently not a popular destination for architecture tourists and – as I would later find out – like many of Mies’ other built works, is relatively unknown compared with his famous buildings such as the Bar- celona Pavilion, the Seagram Building and in particular the unbuilt projects such as the Skyscraper for the Friedrichstraße Rail- way Station in Berlin.

In my numerous conversations with architects, theorists and historians during my research for Das ungebaute Berlin,¹ Mies van der Rohe emerged as the most important figure for the present day. His work has been enormously influential for contemp orary architectural practice. He himself hoped that his work would be judged by the degree to which others adopted the principles he had developed. Rather than seeking a unique, individual form of expression, he strove to find generally applicable principles:

“I think the influence my work has on other people is based on its reasonableness. Everybody can use it without being a copy- ist, because it is quite objective, and I think if I find something objective I will use it. It does not matter who did it.”² This rational approach differs markedly, for example, from that of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose creations became ever more fantastic over the course of his career. During the same period, Mies’ model of a high-rise tower became an almost ubiquitous element of many North American cities. They were seen as being timeless.

Today, in the context of the formal excesses of the last 15 years and the drive to create ever more spectacular and eccentric ges- tures, Mies’ focus on the elementary aspects of architecture has once again gained relevance.

The more I saw and the more I read, the more I felt that the image portrayed in the available literature was distorted. Re- search on Mies has concentrated on his canonical works and long been reluctant to consider all his buildings as equally significant works in his oeuvre. In the first book published on Mies in 1947, Philip Johnson writes: “All the buildings and projects which Mies considers in any way important are illustrated in this volume, with the exception of a few buildings which were not exe- cuted according to his standards […].”³ In actual fact only about introduCtion

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9 Reconstruction of the garden

façade, photomontage half of his European buildings are shown, and even the two later

volumes Mies in Berlin and Mies in America, published in 2001, show only about half his buildings with photos.

When asked which of his buildings he felt was most important, Mies responded simply that “no single building stands out.”⁴ Taking him at his word, this volume sets out to document his complete oeuvre of built works for the first time.⁵ Each building is documented in the same way one after the other so that the whole represents a genealogy of built form. Without see- ing this developmental process, it is impossible to categorically conclude whether Mies’ work is characterised by radical changes or continuity. Over the past few years I have visited and documented all of Mies’ surviving built works, in the process becom- ing a photographer.

The book documents every one of Mies’ 80 realised buildings and building complexes arranged in chronological order. Only the buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology are grouped together in a block as they were conceived as a coherent ensemble. Thirty of the buildings – marked in bold type in the table of contents – have been analysed and described in more detail.

The analysis of each building follows an identical three-stage methodical structure.

To begin with, the building is documented as it was actually built. The second section then documents any “Later alterations”

made to the building, while the third section examines the relevance of the results of the analysis for our view of Mies’ work and contribution today. This third step – “The building as seen from the present” – examines the built work not in relation to its gen- esis in a historical context but in terms of its design from an architectural standpoint.

While existing books on Mies consider both his built and unbuilt work together, separating the “significant” work from the

“insignificant”, the intention here is to communicate an impression of the spatial dimension of the buildings as they are experi- enced by the user or visitor. The buildings are analysed with respect to their relationship to place, how one moves through them, the orchestration of light and visual axes as well as their materiality and tectonics. While Mies described “building [as] giving form to reality,”⁶ from a phenomenological viewpoint, we see these buildings today not just as environments for living in but also as buildings shaped by the reality of having been used. Almost all of Mies’ buildings have been altered in some, not always immediately perceptible, way or other. By looking back at his architecture from a contemporary perspective, we also consider them in terms of the changes made, the different purposes they have served as well as, in some cases, their destruction.

The documentation of the built works also enables us to ex- amine the central themes that characterise Mies’ architecture.

The connection between indoors and outdoors, the articulation of how the building meets the ground or the structural separa- tion of column and wall are just some of the recurring themes in his work. The continuity of the principles that Mies adhered to connect his earlier and later work, even though they look quite different on the outside. Mies strove to find simple but exem- plary solutions for elementary transitions and junctions. For contemporary architects, it is interesting to study how Mies resolved junctions between different materials and transitions from mono - lithic walls to glazed surfaces, the different forms that the corners of buildings take in different constellations or how compact cores have been placed in open-plan layouts. Mies created closed and open “flowing” spaces, and was also not afraid to combine different spatial concepts.

The spatial arrangement of the buildings is shown using floor plans and site plans, which instead of showing an idealised plan from the design phase show the situation as built. All of the plans

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Riehl House, Neubabelsberg 1908

Hall, reconstruction of the original colour scheme

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have been redrawn by myself, based on the working drawings.

Because many of Mies’ American buildings were built in collab or - ation with other architecture offices, many of the relevant working drawings are not in the Mies van der Rohe Archives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York nor in the various published volumes of The Mies van der Rohe Archive. The architecture offices responsible for the restoration of Mies’ buildings were most helpful, as were public records, building surveys and the archives of the owners. The existing monographs on Mies almost exclusively show cleaned presentation drawings without legends or dimensions, partly because the information contained within the working drawings becomes illegible when reduced in size and the plans themselves become harder to read. To reconstruct the drawings, historical photographs as well as the buildings themselves proved to be an invaluable source.

The formal presentation of the newly drawn floor plans ech- oes the reductive character of the plans that Mies published. Al- though he highlighted the objective character of his principles, the resulting work and the drawings of them are often idiosyn- cratic. The new floor plans published here contain only what is absolutely necessary and aim to be as consistent as possible, lending them an objective character. Furnishings, paving pat- terns, vegetation, the arcs of door openings, directions of stairs and ramps as well as the labelling of the individual rooms have all been omitted in favour of showing the building structure as clearly as possible. The built elements of external landscaping and gardens designed by Mies, some of which have been recon- structed from aerial photographs, are also shown.

The plans have been drawn consistently to a scale of 1:400 and oriented north. Ensembles of buildings are shown at a scale of 1:4000 and details at a scale of 1:10. Each building is shown with at least one floor plan or site plan. Because relevant plans were not always available, not all buildings are illustrated with a floor plan. The drawings comprise lines and surfaces all drawn with the same line thickness.

The photographs take an analytical view of the respective buildings and concentrate predominantly on the built structures, leaving out later conversions, current uses or changed urban surroundings wherever possible. The focus lies on the building substance and the detailing, as well as the placement of the building in the landscape. Both the earlier private houses as well as the later high-rise towers were placed at prominent positions, usually adjoining a park or a lake. For the Lafayette Park Estate, for example, it took decades for the trees to grow to maturity.

The photos show that the architecture has transcended time.

In cases where buildings have been altered to such a degree that the original conception is no longer visible – for examples the garden façade of Mies’ very first work, the Riehl House – the original situation can be shown by means of a photographic montage.

Another approach is to colourise black-and-white photographs to show the original colour scheme. Thomas Ruff, for example, created a series of photographs of Mies’ works that consciously manipulates new and historic photographs. Digital techniques have greatly simplified the retouching of photographs, and such techniques are now common practice in architectural photogra- phy. The photographs in this book have not been retouched and have a strictly documentary character.

Although most of Mies’ buildings are now listed, the building substance is still in danger of being lost during renovation works. Many typical Miesian elements, such as his minimalist bal- ustrades, do not conform to current building regulations and are thus often the target of modernisation measures. Other buildings, such as the IIT Test Cell from 1950–52, simply stood in the way of new building projects and were demolished. Built situations are not the only aspects that change over time; so too does the appreciation of architecture, which in turn is influenced by

the respective ideological climate. For example, the attitude towards vast apartment blocks has changed fundamentally since the 1960s when the Colonnade and Pavilion Apartments were built. Past research also sidelined certain projects. Mies’ personal path to radical modernism was, for example, by no means as linear as it is often portrayed. The conventional houses that Mies built during the 1920s – some of them after publishing a series of avant-garde projects in the press – were deemed simply bread-and-butter work.⁷ In her book Mies in America, Phyllis Lambert attempts to highlight the works where Mies himself was more intensely involved in the design process. Mies, however, stated that: “I don’t make every building different.”⁸

Mies’ own standpoint was influenced by the particular course of his career. Ludwig Mies – he added van der Rohe later – did not study as an architect⁹ but learned his trade from scratch working in practice: “I learned from my father. He was a stonemason.

[…] My father said, ‘Don’t read these dumb books. Work.’”¹⁰ Al- though he did develop a strong interest in philosophical writ- ings and published texts of his own, Mies would always emphasise the enormous influence of his background as a craftsman in Aachen on his personal development. The discipline he applied to developing the building construction can be seen in the ex- treme attention he gave to the details. This precision contrasts markedly with the later works of Le Corbusier and Walter Gro- pius and is one of the reasons for his lasting influence to the present day. Even after more than half a century, few buildings around the world can claim to be detailed to the same exacting level of quality as the Seagram Building. Its clarity of expression set a benchmark that many contemporary buildings still fail to measure up to.

Looking back, Mies described the development of his work as a persistent path of striving for clarity of construction. His obsessive search for order means that his work can be seen as an ongoing process of optimisation. His high-rise towers are in principle essentially identical skeleton frame constructions that permit an open-plan floor plan, but he refined the detailing with each new building. While the early apartment blocks on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago exhibit numerous deficits with respect to their building physics, the later towers resolved many of these problems. Ironically, although the quality of the construction of the later buildings is much better, in history books they are regarded as being less architecturally significant than the earlier prototypes.

When Mies said, “I always apply the same principles,”¹¹ he was referring to rational aspects that can be taught and analysed.

The building analyses in this book elaborate the principles that Mies sought to communicate as a teacher: “You can teach stu- dents how to work; you can teach them technique – how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions – of order. You can teach general principles.”¹²

In the 1920s, Mies presented five speculative projects – two glass skyscrapers, an office building, and two country houses, one made of ferro-concrete, the other of brick – that explored the constructional possibilities of particular building materials. With the exception of the Skyscraper on the Friedrichstraße, none of the projects were designed for a specific location. They were instead programmatic, visionary concepts that explored a “principle” to the point that the images acquired an iconic character. In his floor plan for a skyscraper with polygonal curves that aimed to achieve a “rich play by the reflection of light”¹³ he did not show the supporting structure at all. Similarly, his floor plan for the brick country house is more abstract and schematic in character than a floor plan for a real building. The diagrammatic character of these designs is significant because it would later influence his built work.

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,

Glass skyscraper, 1922, floor plan Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, iNtRoductioN 11

Project for a brick country house, 1924, floor plan

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Peter Behrens, Kröller-Müller House, Proposal from 1911, ground floor plan 6

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1 Vestibule 2 Hall 3 Salon 4 dining room 5 Gentleman’s study 6 Living room 7 Anteroom 8 Lady’s quarters 9 Exhibition gallery 10 Garden with fountain 11 Greenhouse 12 Water basin

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iNtRoductioN 13 Despite the vehemence with which Mies opposed individual-

istic solutions, the buildings he created were very often unique and he was commonly regarded as an artist. The rational principles that he propagated were more a means to an end, as he believed strongly in the spiritual dimension of architecture. “The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves,” he said, adding,

“Art is almost always a question of proportions.”¹⁴

Proportion can also be understood in broader terms as a relationship, for example between people and their built or natural environment. Wolf Tegethoff has written about the proportions in Mies’ buildings: “A demonstrable, calculable system of proportions underlying the plans – whether of a rational or geometrical nature – is […] in no single case apparent. […] Rather the suspi- cion arises that mathematical or geometrical correspondences in the ground plan were deliberately avoided, even when they ap- peared to be perfectly justified from a structural point of view.”¹⁵ Tegethoff’s analysis, however, did not consider Mies’ early work.

The recently discovered building records of the Warnholtz House include a ground floor plan that shows a salon measuring exactly 5 by 7.5 metres, a vestibule of 3 by 4 metres, a veranda of 4 by 5 metres and a library that is precisely 4 by 3 metres.

These whole number proportions, which can also be seen in some of Mies’ other buildings, were also characteristic of the floor plans of the architect and designer Peter Behrens, in whose atelier Mies worked from 1908 to 1912 with the exception of a brief pause in between. Although Mies had previously learned his trade while working for Bruno Paul, Behrens would become a central figure for his development: “We were more Behrens-like than Behrens himself,”¹⁶ as he recalls. The clear proportions of Behrens’ rooms can be seen, for example, in his design for the Kröller-Müller House, which Mies also worked on; Mies was later commissioned to draw up a design of his own based on the same requirements. In the linear succession of representative spaces, from the dining room to the salon and from the hall to the gentleman’s study, the proportions of the rooms in Behrens’ design alternate between 3:4 and a square. The proportions of the hall, for example, can be seen by examining the position of the beams on the ceiling. Mies, however, was averse to designing perfectly square spaces, and he only found a legitimate case to do so for a freestanding pavilion with four identical façades that face in the four directions of the compass.

Mies declared a dislike for the word design: “It means everything and nothing. Many believe they can do everything, from designing a comb to planning a railway station –, the result is that nothing is good.” He, on the other hand, was “only interested in building.”¹⁷ This opinion set him apart from his teach- ers Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens, both of whom were trained artists who had taken up architecture auto-didactically. They ap- proached building not from the construction but from the form and the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Mies recalls that, “Behrens had a great sense of the great form. That was his main interest;

and that I certainly understood and learned from him.” How- ever, he was also critical: “It then became clear to me that it was not the task of architecture to invent form. I tried to understand what that task was. I asked Peter Behrens, but he could not give me an answer. He did not ask that question.”¹⁸ This discrepancy was also the source of an altercation with a colleague in Bruno Paul’s office. “Later, we had a falling out, because I said that Bruno Paul was more of an interior designer than an architect.

Our argument grew increasingly vocal. He mounted a full defence of Bruno Paul and I did precisely the opposite. I told him that what he did had nothing to do with architecture.”¹⁹ When asked to name architects that inspired him, Mies cited Karl Friedrich

Schinkel and Hendrik Petrus Berlage whose “honest” constructions he greatly admired.

But Mies also designed furniture, some of it permanent fittings for the respective building, or else chairs and armchairs, which he patented. He designed showroom apartments and ex- hibitions, and also converted existing buildings, including an out- building in Potsdam²⁰ and a factory in Berlin-Steglitz for the Bau- haus School, which he headed at the time. Although this book does not document the entirety of Mies’ creative endeavours, it does bring a large part of his built oeuvre out of the shadows and back into the limelight.

While Mies and his biographers portrayed his career as a linear path of development, it is in reality highly complex. Although he never saw himself as an urban designer, he often designed the spaces between groups of buildings. And while he strove to achieve buildings of great simplicity, the constructions this en- tailed were often exceptionally complex. Similarly, he had a very pragmatic attitude to the possibilities offered by new industrial production methods, but was at the same time firmly rooted in the traditions of classical architecture. He defined rules by which he worked and was highly disciplined about adhering to them, and at the same time produced a remarkably varied repertoire of solutions. And while his work can be clearly divided into a Euro- pean and an American phase, many aspects of his early work often paved the way for what came later. In this book, I have attempted to explicitly identify these references to emphasise the coherence of his work: while his individual buildings may be stylistically different, they exhibit structural similarities. But what seems most contradictory today is the influence of Mies’ work on architectural production over the years, and the large number of soulless buildings that have resulted. While Mies expounded many principles, they were for him never more than a means of striving to reach a higher spiritual order.

1 carsten Krohn (ed.), Das ungebaute Berlin (Unbuilt Berlin), Berlin 2010.

2 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in conversation with Graeme Shankland, in:

The Listener, 15 oct. 1959, p. 620.

3 Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe, New York 1947, p. 7. the sentence ends: “and some projects of the 1910–1914 period which were destroyed in the bombing of Berlin.” Nothing, however, is known of projects from this period that were destroyed. the Warnholtz House, built 1914–15, was only demolished in 1960.

4 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in conversation with Katharine Kuh, in:

Saturday Review, 23 Jan. 1965, p. 22.

5 Almost all his buildings are shown in: Yehuda E. Safran, Mies van der Rohe, Lisbon 2000, but without floor plans.

6 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “Notes to Lectures”, 1950, in: Fritz Neu- meyer, The Artless Word – Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art, cambridge, Mass., 1991, p. 328.

7 For further information on the reception of the houses built between 1921 and 1926, see: Andreas Marx and Paul Weber, “Konventionelle Kon- tinuität – Mies van der Rohes Baumaßnahmen an Haus urban 1924–26. An- lass zu einer Neuinterpretation seines konventionellen Werkes der 1920er Jahre”, in: Johannes cramer and dorothée Sack (eds.), Mies van der Rohe:

Frühe Bauten – Probleme der Erhaltung, Probleme der Bewertung (Mies van der Rohe – Early Built Works: Problems in their conservation and assessment), Petersberg 2004, pp. 163–178.

8 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in conversation with ulrich conrads in 1964, produced on a phonograph record: “Mies in Berlin”, Bauwelt.

9 He studied from June 1907 to May 1908 at the education department of the Berlin Museum of Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum) under Bruno Paul. See also thomas Steigenberger, “Mies van der Rohe – ein Schüler Bruno Pauls?” in: Johannes cramer and dorothée Sack (eds.), Mies van der Rohe: Frühe Bauten – Probleme der Erhaltung, Probleme der Bewertung (Mies van der Rohe – Early Built Works: Problems in their conservation and assessment), Petersberg 2004, pp. 151–162.

10 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in: John Peter, The Oral History of Modern Architecture. Interviews with the Greatest Architects of the Twentieth Century, New York 1994, p. 156, 158.

11 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in conversation with Katharine Kuh, in:

Saturday Review, 23 Jan. 1965, p. 61.

12 ibid., p. 23.

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13 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in: Frühlicht, vol. 4, 1922, p. 124.

14 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in conversation with Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Broadcasting), in: Der Architekt, 1966, p. 324.

15 Wolf tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe – The Villas and Country Houses, New York 1985, pp. 77–78.

16 Stanford Anderson, “considering Peter Behrens: interviews with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (chicago, 1961) and Walter Gropius (cambridge, Mass., 1964)”, in: Engramma, no. 100, Sep./oct. 2012. www.engramma.it.

17 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in conversation with christian Norberg- Schulz, in: Éditions de l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, L’œuvre de Mies van der Rohe, Paris 1958, p. 100.

18 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in: Moisés Puentes (ed.), Conversations with Mies van der Rohe, New York 2008, p. 54.

19 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in conversation with dirk Lohan, transcribed manuscript, Mies van der Rohe Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York (translated into English by JR).

20 cf. Andreas Marx and Paul Weber, “Zur Neudatierung von Mies van der Rohes Landhaus in Eisenbeton”, in: Architectura, vol. 2, 2008, p. 160.

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Although the house for a philosophy professor is situated in a col- ony of villas in what is now Potsdam, Mies noted that “the house was not a villa. Rather, its character resembled the houses in the Märkische region, like those in Werder which have a simple pitched roof, a gable and a pair of dormers, usually of the eyebrow kind.”¹ Despite the modest appearance of the building, the basic typo- logy has been significantly modified and reinterpreted. Rather than arranging the long side parallel to the street, as is typical for this house type, the building is rotated by 90 degrees and turns away from the street, a gesture reinforced by the wall along the front.

Mies introduced a large step in the terrain of the steep slop- ing site to create a plinth on which the building stands, affording a view of the Griebnitzsee lake. Both parts, the house and the plinth, are fused to form a single structure. On entering the garden, one is immediately drawn into the architectural composition, as the upper terrace is already part of the constellation. Enclosed by a peri meter wall, the garden has a cloister-like intimacy that continues into the interior of the building.

In the centre of the house, Mies took the bold step at this early juncture in his career of creating a “general space”, a term that was used in a prominent publication of the day to denote a room with no specific function.² In the book in question, such halls are described simply as the “central room of the house”, followed by a detailed elaboration of their composition:

“Even in small houses halls always have a fire-place. Halls are furnished and their floors are carpeted. Wood panelling is the fa- vourite treatment for walls, indeed it is considered the ideal dec- oration. […] In all circumstances, the hall is not permitted to rise through two storeys […]. The floor may be composed of […] a hard wood. All-over carpeting is avoided […]. But there is always a deep- piled, warm rug in the centre and a thick one in front of the fire […].

[Where the staircase leads out of the hall], architects are reluctant to expose the whole flight to view and permit only the first few steps to be seen. […] In the […] country-house it is con cealed because it leads only to the bedrooms, which are consider ed to be private. […] There are certain pieces of furniture […] that re appear in every kind of hall. These include a heavy hall-table and a settle.

[…] English round gate-legged tables are very popular as hall- tables. […] In smaller halls, there will be merely sev eral wooden chairs and a wooden settle.”³

Mies’ use of a “general space” of the kind described here by Hermann Muthesius does not necessarily imply that he was aware of this text, or that it was a creation of his own devices: by then this arrangement had become an established pattern – a typo- logy of sorts.

Although this central space was rather austere, especially when the doors were closed, it was also spacious, a quality that Muthe- sius deemed characteristic for this type of room. By arranging the space so that it opens directly onto the loggia with a panoramic view of the lake and the woodland beyond, the hall is transformed into an architectural set-piece. On entering the room, visitors initi- ally face the stairs, but a change in direction toward the light en- sures that one only sees the first few steps. A door on the landing signals unequivocally that what lies behind is private.

The floor plan of the house is organised in such a way that, when the doors are open, one can see outside from this central hall in several directions. A company of guests seated at the dining table would each have a view outdoors wherever they sat, and all the visual axes cross in a star-shape at the centre of the room.

All of this lends the building as a whole an extremely open impression. Two alcoves adjoining the hall can be separated off by curtains, creating different situations: one more intimate and one more open. The same opposition can also be seen in the different faces of the house: the introverted side facing the street and the extroverted side facing the private garden.

riehl house

Neubabelsberg, Germany, 1908

Ground floor plan

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Views from the street 17

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later alterations to the building

The house was renovated in 2001.⁴ The garden wall, balcony, flat tile roofing and chimney are all reconstructions. The enclosure of the loggia with perimeter glazing, which had been undertaken at an earlier date, was retained and the original condition was not reinstated. The original enclosed staircase and dumb waiter was replaced with an open staircase and the entrance door was changed. Most of the original fittings, with the exception of a few elements in the attic, have also been lost. As the original planning records and working drawings no longer exist and the published plans are idealised plans that differ from the building survey, it is not possible to conclusively determine the original plans of the lower floor and attic.

the building as seen from the present

This “general space” that Mies created right at the beginning of his career marks the first use of what Mies would later term “universal space”: an architecture independent of a specific function. As he explained, “I have always liked large rooms in which I can do as I please […]. I said: ‘Make your spaces big enough, man, so that you can walk around in them freely, and not just in one predetermined direction!’ […] We don’t know at all whether people will do with them what we expect them to. Functions are not so clear or so constant; they change faster than the building.”⁵

Mies had evidently wished to achieve precisely this spatial constellation and precisely these proportions. The ratio of the width to length of the hall is 2:3, as is the ratio of the height to width. The alcoves adjoining the hall have the same proportions, as does the entrance vestibule and the windows and opening onto the loggia.

From his later buildings, we know that Mies never left the proportions to chance, declaring that “the artistic expresses itself in the proportions”.⁶ His floor plan, however, could only be achieved with considerable constructional effort, as the spatial disposition conflicted with the structure of the building. The dimensions and orientation of the hall could only be achieved without the use of columns by employing a concealed supporting construction. Hid- den columns bear a hidden I-beam on which the transverse gable wall of the upper storey rests. This expensive supplementary construction shows how far Mies was from his later ideal of structural clarity. But it also shows how uncompromisingly he wished to realise this particular plan within the confines of this unassuming building type.

The Riehl House can also be analysed according to Gottfried Semper’s theory of the four elements of architecture. In the nine- teenth century, Semper characterised architecture according to four primordial elements – hearth, roof, enclosure and mound – each of which he related to a specific material. In the Riehl House, the hearth is related to the materials metal and ceramics out of which the “fireplace” is made. Although this is actually just a radiator screen, its altar-like treatment and placement lend it the status of a fireplace. With regard to the enclosure, Semper noted that “the word Wand [wall] has the same root as Gewand [gar- ment]. They describe the textile or fabric of the walls that clothe the space.”⁷ Even when walls were later made of masonry, pa- nelled with wood or clad with sheets of marble, Semper argued that they still represented a non-structural enclosure that derived from the textile fabric of old. Although only visible in the tectonic articulation, and only hinted at discreetly, the principle of the sep - aration of structure from non-structural infill is visible in the fine profiling of the pilasters of the façade. On the garden frontage, these infill panels are actually omitted in a manner akin to a half- timbered structure. Finally, this elemental approach to the building design is most apparent in its relationship to the topography: the building is firmly anchored with the site by a substantial mound.

1 From a conversation with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the documentary film “Mies van der Rohe” by Georgia van der Rohe, 1986.

2 Hermann Muthesius, Das Englische Haus, Berlin 1904, vol. 3 (English-language edition: Hermann Muthesius, The English House. Volume III: The Interior, London 2007).

3 ibid., pp. 170–173.

4 the house was renovated by the architects Heiko Folkerts together with conservation consulting from Jörg Limberg. See the contribution by Fol- kerts and Limberg in: Johannes cramer and dorothée Sack (eds.), Mies van der Rohe: Frühe Bauten – Probleme der Erhaltung – Probleme der Bewertung, Petersberg 2004, pp. 27–55.

5 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in conversation with ulrich conrads in 1964, produced on a phonograph record, Mies in Berlin, Bauwelt, Berlin 1966.

6 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Manuscript of a “radio broadcast” on 17 Aug.

1931, in: Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word – Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art, cambridge, Mass. 1991, p. 311.

7 Gottfried Semper, Die vier Elemente der Baukunst, Braunschweig 1851, p. 57 (The Four Elements of Architecture, cambridge, Mass. 2011).

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RiEHL HouSE 19 Bird‘s eye view

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Although the house takes the form of a decidedly compact block, its design is dictated by a desire to relate the interior to the garden. The straightforward and unassuming impression one has of the building from the street belies the complexity of the circula- tion within and the many-layered system of visual axes that connect the indoors with outdoors.

A curved recess in the garden fence serves as an inviting gesture, drawing the visitor through the gate and directing them toward the asymmetrically placed entrance to the house. Alt- hough the entrance vestibule is located in the corner of the building – like the house itself in the north corner of the site –, one has views from this first room in all directions. Several visual axes pass through the house and cross at the point where the visitor’s route into the house divides, one way leading on to the representative rooms, the other to the private areas. When the doors are open, one has a view from this point in the entrance hall of the entire ground floor with views beyond into the garden. Adjoining the study of the house’s owner, a lawyer and art collector, is the central dining room with a long room for making music beyond.

In the plan, a further rounded element, the bottom step of the stairs, serves as a similar inviting gesture encouraging people to move through the house.

Mies, then 25 years of age and working in Peter Behren’s architecture office, told the client, who was the same age as him, that, “The architect must get to know the people who will live in the planned house. From their needs, the rest inevitably follows. Of course, in addition to the wishes of the client, the position, orientation and size of the plot also play an important role in determin- ing the final plan of the house. The ‘where’ and ‘how’ of the ex- terior then follows naturally from all of that.”¹ As the building was to house a collection of artworks, the rooms of the ground floor have a representative character while the bedrooms and child’s room, as well as the bathroom, closet and guest rooms, are located on the upper floor. The lower ground, which opens onto a nar- row yard to the north, houses the kitchen, washroom and a “maid’s room”. Thanks to a steep slope, the two-storey building appears as if it has three storeys on the north side.

The clear proportions of the rooms in the interior are reflected in the outdoor areas. The ratio of length to height of the house corresponds to the Golden Section, echoing Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum. Two different gardens, each the same width as the house, are related directly to the building. The first of these is enclosed on three sides by a plant-covered wooden pergola and reached directly from the loggia, itself a transitional zone extending deep into the building. The second part of the garden, a sunken rectangular court, also relates directly to the façade. Five floor-to-ceiling French windows open extrovertly onto the garden presenting a panoramic view of the surroundings. A single step leads from the house into the garden, and from there a small stair on into the sunken garden terrace. A figurative sculpture was placed in the garden, its position – as marked in the plans of the garden – aligning with the main axis of the house. The sculpture marks the end of this axis and helps to maximise the spacious impression of this otherwise modest-sized house.

The house as it exists today represents a partial reconstruction after significant alterations had been made. The landscaping of the garden was lost and has not been reinstated by the current owner, an anthroposophical school. The house first changed hands not long after its completion. Hugo Perls, a lawyer, art historian and later a Plato scholar, gave the house in exchange for five paintings by Max Liebermann to Eduard Fuchs, a founder member of the com- munist party and also an art collector. Between 1927 and 1928, Fuchs added a gallery wing, also designed by Mies, but was forced to flee Germany five years later when his house, along with his Perls house

Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany, 1911–12

First floor plan Ground floor plan View from the garden 20

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Garden façade 21

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22

Loggia from the garden Loggia

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notable collection of erotic art, was seized by the SS. After years of dereliction, the house was converted under the direction of Al- bert Speer into a secret facility for the production of instruments and gauges for retaliatory weapons (V-rockets). After the war, the company continued to flourish producing technical medical equip- ment from the house until the end of the 1970s.

The windows and doors were changed and the loggia was closed off. Extensions were built, encasing the original building like a second skin. A single photograph remains of the house directly after its completion showing an idealised view from a perspective that matched Mies’ own presentation drawings and echoed those of Schinkel. Dietrich von Beulwitz, who was entrusted with the renovation, relied heavily on recollections of the building by Philip Johnson, who had studied the building intensively before the alterations were undertaken and was able to describe the original tones of colour used.² Von Beulwitz described the difficulties he had because “modern plaster and paint, all industrial products, are quite different from the old materials.” The building was originally rendered with a “plaster of slaked lime” and “a lime paint put on ‘al fresco’ and combining with the plaster, rubbing off slightly over the course of time and giving a particularly lively effect.”³

The entire design hinges around the position of the dining table in the geometric centre of the house. It is at this central point that the two primary axes that connect the house and garden in- tersect at right angles to one another, and where other, diagonal sight lines cross before continuing on into the greenery outside.

This star-shaped constellation of axes affords a panoramic view of the natural surroundings, uniting indoor and outdoor space in a single spatial concept. The compact form of the house exhibits a sparing sobriety and geometric rigour that is also to be found in the proportion of the rooms. The central room around the dining table has the proportions 2:3, extending to become almost a square when the windows to the loggia are opened. This tension between the building’s geometric precision and expansive sense of space informs the character of the building.

After a long period in which the house was accorded little attention by scholars of Mies, with the exception of repeated references to the influence of Schinkel,⁴ it was eventually recognised as containing early indications of characteristics that were to develop in Mies’ later work. For Fritz Neumeyer, one particular detail reveals one of Mies’ central themes: the expression of a clear and rational construction. Slots, one centimetre thick, are cut into the side walls of the loggia, articulating the corners visually as load- bearing columns. “This small detail indicates the autonomy of the tectonic skeleton,”⁵ argued Neumeyer, introducing a further inter- pretation of the building: the loggia could be read as a pergola that has been inserted into the building.

The loggia has a pivotal function. As a transitional space, it links indoors with outdoors. It is part of the house when seen as an extension of the interior, and part of the garden when regarded as a continuation of the pergola that encompasses the outdoor space.

The transition between indoors and outdoors is articulated both through the precise placement of the openings as well as the continuous step from the music room to the garden. Although very discreet, this detail, in combination with the other steps leading down to the sunken court with the sculpture, lends the passage of movement a noticeable sense of descent. This in turn creates the impression that the house rests on a raised podium. In his later works, Mies also positioned sculptures outdoors in such a way that they relate to the interior, heightening its impression of space.

1 As recalled by Hugo Perls in: Warum ist Kamilla schön? Von Kunst, Künst- lern und Kunsthandel, Munich 1962, p. 16.

2 Von Beulwitz assembled a collection of all the documents he could find

that provide an indication of the original condition of the building. For further information on the renovation, see: dietrich von Beulwitz, “the Perls House by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe” in: Architectural Design, vol. 11/12, 1983.

3 ibid, p. 63.

4 cf. Philip Johnson 1947, p. 14; Blake 1960, p. 160; Spaeth 1985, p. 22.

5 Fritz Neumeyer, “Space for Reflection: Block versus Pavilion”, in: Franz Schulze (ed.), Mies van der Rohe – Critical Essays, New York 1989, pp.

164–165.

PERLS HouSE 23

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24

kröller-Müller house, Façade MoCk-uP Wassenaar, Netherlands, 1912–13

destroyed

Elevation Ground floor plan 6

1

2

3

4

5

8

1 Vestibule 2 Hall 3 dining room 4 corridor 5 Pergola 6 Water basin 7 Lady’s living quarters 8 Gallery

9 Garden with small pond 10 Greenhouse

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On a coastal site on the Dutch North Sea coast, a full-scale mock- up of the façades of a house, constructed of painted sailcloth over wood framing, was erected in winter 1912/13 between the dunes and woods. The only known photograph of the installation was published 15 years later in an article, accompanied by the note:

“Mies was quite right when he remarked on this project that if one were to remove the detailing of the façade, one would have a building very much like those he makes today. That is, a building in which living is not dictated by the arrangement of the house, but the arrangement of the house follows the process of living.”¹

The original floor plan no longer exists, but Mies later sket- ched a sequence of some of the spaces from memory.² He placed the entrance at the corner of the H-shaped plan of the building.

Visitors pass through a vestibule into a representative hall from which a path leads to the dining room and a long passage to a second wing with a large exhibition gallery. In this second wing on the far side, a hall also serves as a vestibule distributing the visitors in all directions.

The lady of the house, Helene Kröller-Müller, had specific ideas of her own for a monumental country house. To exhibit their collection of paintings, a windowless hall was required that she wanted placed near to her own room.³ The organisation of the programme of spaces was complex as the different functio- nal areas needed to be independent of one another but still be incorporated into an overall composition. The different areas in- cluded a succession of reception rooms for entertaining, the private residence of the couple, a service wing for the servants as well as semi-public areas for the art collection. This programme of spaces, representing the different living processes, was recor- ded by Peter Behrens, who was originally commissioned to un- dertake the project. His design was also tested on site as a full- scale model but was ultimately turned down. Mies worked at the time as Behrens’ assistant and was able to establish a good working relationship with the clients. Mies was then asked to develop a design of his own for the house, which in turn marked the end of his collaboration with Behrens.

In Behrens’ earlier project, visitors were also led via a vestibule into a hall from which a corridor continued onto the far wing with the windowless gallery space. The living room, “in which the family usually dined, as is typical in Holland,”⁴ is axially aligned with a pool of water in front of it while the dining room was used only for special events or entertaining guests. The wing with the succession of reception rooms is divided into two linear zones, one for the service functions and one for the served rooms. The kitchen was situated on the upper storey. Fritz Hoeber wrote of the lady’s rooms: “The square of the gentleman’s room at one end corresponds to a large vestibule at the other end from which the lady’s personal living quarters can be reached. Her living room, replete with a special wardrobe, can only be reached through this room; there is no door directly from the hallway. And to con- tinue this analogy with a monastic cell, the lady’s living room has its own private garden, its ‘giardino secreto’ in an intimate courtyard whose short sides are flanked by freestanding columns, affording an expansive view from the windows of her room while still providing a sense of enclosure.”⁵

Mies carried over this arrangement of the garden into his own project, flanking it with a greenhouse, and likewise attributing it to the lady’s quarters.⁶ He heightened its sense of intimacy by making only one room open onto the garden. We know from records that Helene Kröller-Müller had found Behrens’ architecture to be lacking in intimacy.⁷

One can only speculate as to why Mies’ design was eventually rejected. While Mies was developing his design, Hendrik Pe- trus Berlage was also commissioned to draw up a second design.

The Kröller-Müllers consulted their artistic advisor, who is repor- ted to have said of Berlage’s project, “that is art,” and of Mies’,

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7 9 10

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26

Elevation upper floor plan

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“that is not.” However, Berlage’s project also never came to fru- ition. Mies even went to Paris to solicit a critique of his own design from the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who wrote in praise of the “handsome asymmetrical arrangement” of the complex, declaring: “Nothing is piecemeal. All the parts hang together and are developed logically.”⁸

The 1:1 model of the house was set up on a system of rails so that it could be moved about. “Everything inside – the partitions and the ceilings – could move up and down,”⁹ recalled Mies, noting in retrospect that it could be dangerous to erect a house as a model.

In his use of the term “dangerous”, Mies was probably referring to the fact that there is more to building than erecting a life-size impression of its form. Even when one can experience its spatial characteristics, it lacks all materiality and the specifics of its construction, as well as a connection with the place. Rem Koolhaas on the other hand has written in S,M,L,XL: “I suddenly saw him inside the colossal volume, a cubic tent vastly lighter and more sugges- tive than the sombre and classical architecture it attempted to em- body. I guessed – almost with envy – that this strange ‘enactment’

of a future house had drastically changed him: were its whiteness and weightlessness an overwhelming revelation of everything he did not yet believe in? An epiphany of anti-matter? Was this can- vas cathedral an acute flash-forward to another architecture?”¹⁰ The development of Mies’ work would nevertheless display an evolutionary continuity for a long time to come. Leaving aside the rigorous classical arrangement of the façades, the way in which the secondary volumes interlock “organically” with the primary block-like building volume already hints at his later work. Mies would later say of this project: “Certainly I was influenced by Schinkel, but the plan is not in any way Schinkel’s.”¹¹

A water basin was to be placed in front of the expansive complex in which the architecture would be reflected, a situation com- parable to that seen in the Barcelona Pavilion, for here too a second smaller pool was planned within a more intimate en closed courtyard to reflect a sculptural figure.

A smaller model was also constructed of Mies’ project but in a modified form. In this model, the intimate courtyard with the smaller pool and a sculpture on a round plinth is open on the other side. The central space, which corresponds to the lady’s room in Behrens’ project, no longer has three large French windows opening onto the garden but is now puzzlingly entirely enclosed and is marked as a gallery for engravings.¹²

1 Paul Westheim, “Mies van der Rohe – Entwicklung eines Architekten”, in:

Das Kunstblatt, vol. 2, 1927, p. 56.

2 Sketch of the Ground floor plan from around 1931. Published in: Barry Bergdoll and terence Riley (eds.), Mies in Berlin. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Die Berliner Jahre 1907–1938, Munich 2001, p. 166.

3 cf. Sergio Polano, “Rose-shaped, Like an open Hand. Helene Kröller- Müller’s House”, in: Rassegna, dec. 1993, p. 23.

4 Fritz Hoeber, Peter Behrens, Munich 1913, p. 201.

5 ibid., pp. 201–202.

6 cf. Mies’ legend “House of flowers for the lady”.

7 cf. note 3.

8 the letter from Julius Meier-Graefe can be found in the MoMA Archives.

cited in: Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst, Mies van der Rohe – A Critical Biography, chicago 2012, pp. 41–42.

9 Mies van der Rohe in conversation with Henry thomas cadbury-Brown in:

Architectural Association Journal, July/Aug. 1959, p. 29.

10 Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL, Rotterdam 1995, p. 63.

11 cf. note 9, p. 28.

12 cf. note 2.

KRöLLER-MüLLER HouSE, FAçAdE MocK-uP 27

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28

On a site directly adjacent to the Perls House, Mies designed a second L-shaped building made up of a constellation of different building volumes. The building is placed at the north end of a large site, turning its back on its neighbour to the north, while the southern part of the site is kept free for use as a vegetable garden. As with the earlier houses for Riehl and Perls, the façade facing the garden is more open and monumental than the street elevation and features a central frontal projection emphasising the symmetry of the garden elevation. From the north, by cont- rast, one sees only a wall that conceals the service yard and the windows closest to the street are the kitchen windows. With this gesture the house turns away from the street and opens onto the private outdoor areas.

Stylistically, the stuccoed building with a large mansard roof follows a regional building pattern reminiscent of that used by Alfred Messel for similar buildings, as and described by Paul Mebes in his book Um 1800.¹ This stylistic direction emphasises simplicity over the prestige of classicism. The plan of the house bears similarity to that of Peter Behrens’ Wiegand House, especially the pergola that extends out into the garden, but its character is less monumental: its dimensions are more modest and the atmosphere more intimate.

The path from the street to the main entrance ascends a couple of steps to a raised podium. All these elements – the path, steps and podium – are paved with brick. From the entrance, the path through the house does not lead in a straight line to the garden but towards a radiator concealed by a radiator screen that sha- res the same detailing as those in the Perls House, with alterna- ting square-section and round-section bars that have been given a slight entasis much like classical columns. Elsewhere, the deco- rative details have been handled sparingly, with just the sugges- tion of a capital on the columns of the pergola and a heavily ab- stracted eaves cornice detail.

On stepping out into the garden, one enters a further ar- chitectonically defined space. Here the commingling of architecture and the plot’s topography is more strongly articulated than in Mies’ earlier buildings. In this L-shaped complex, the architecture and the garden are likewise conceived as a whole. Like the Perls House next door, the house opens onto a sunken garden area ex- cept that here it is enclosed by a walkway, which takes the form of a colonnaded structure. In his earlier design for the Kröller-Mül- ler House, Mies describes a similar construction as a “pergola”, however these are less like open structures than roofed-over sec- tions of the building complex.

The garden at the rear – a terrace with rough-hewn stone paving – is accessed, like in the Wiegand House, via three French doors in the central, axially-arranged room, as well as from the neighbouring dining room that opens directly onto the pergola.

Again echoing the arrangement of the Wiegand House, the garden is divided into different conceptual areas: a formal, geo- metrically defined area that relates directly to the architecture, and a landscaped garden area. The path through the architecture is articulated to provide framed views and leads up two sets of stone steps to a wooded area from which one has a view of the entire ensemble.

The addition of a later extension over the former service yard alter ed the appearance of the building ensemble. Built in the 1920s, the extension continues the formal language of the building but changes its shape. The garden has also been changed: the straight rear retaining wall has been replaced by a wall with a semi-circular recess.² The pool of water in the lower section is likewise a later addition, replacing a bed of herbaceous plants. The pergola has also been lengthened to accommodate a wheelchair access ramp and a school now uses the building.

werner house

Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany, 1912–13

Ground floor plan

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Garden

Stairs in the garden 29