Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, New and Revised Edition

By Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst

An “excellent” new edition of the definitive biography of the architectural genius, with more than a hundred photos (Booklist, starred review).
 
Upon publication, this book was praised by the Chicago Tribune and “the most comprehensive book ever written about the master designer and, by any measure, the best,” while the Christian Science Monitor noted that “Schulze has both the gift of an architectural historian able to render Mies’s building innovations and that of a biographer able to paint the humanity and shortcomings of the man.” Newsweek called it “a revelation.”
 
Now, this biography of the iconic modernist architect and designer has been extensively updated, providing an even more enlightening and intimate portrait of a man who helped to create the twentieth century world.
 
“This excellent revised edition…has 138 illustrations, incisive descriptions of Mies’ innovative creations and a fascinating account of his Pyrrhic victory in a lawsuit against his disaffected client Edith Farnsworth.”—Booklist (starred review)
“This authoritative biography of Mies van der Rohe has been updated through building records, the recollections of students and a court transcript. It's a gripping read.”—Christopher Woodward, Building Design

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226756028

Book preview

Franz Schulze is the Hollender Professor of Art Emeritus at Lake Forest College. His many books include Philip Johnson: Life and Work and, as coauthor, Chicago’s Famous Buildings, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Edward Windhorst studied architecture with Myron Goldsmith at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He has written two books about modernism in Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12       1  2  3  4  5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75600-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75602-8 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-75600-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-75602-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schulze, Franz, 1927–

Mies van der Rohe : a critical biography / Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst.—New and revised edition.

pages.      cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-75600-4 (hardcover : alkaline paper)—

ISBN 0-226-75600-9 (hardcover : alkaline paper)—

ISBN 978-0-226-75602-8 (e-book)—ISBN 0-226-75602-5 (e-book)

1. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 1886–1969.  2. Architects—Biography. 3. Architecture, Modern—20th century.  I. Windhorst, Edward.  II. Title.

NA1088.M65S38 2012

720.92—dc23

[B]

2011050382

 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Mies van der Rohe

A Critical Biography, New and Revised Edition

Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Prologue

1. Youth in Imperial Germany: 1886–1905

2. Apprenticeship, Marriage, and World War: 1905–18

3. Europe out of the Ashes: 1918–26

4. Weimar at High Tide: 1926–30

5. Political Crises and the End of the Bauhaus: 1930–36

6. America Beckons: 1936–38

7. Architect and Educator: 1938–49

8. A New Architectural Language: 1946–53

9. The 1940s

10. The Farnsworth Saga: 1946–2003

11. American Apogee: Residential Work 1950–59

12. American Apogee: Commercial and Institutional Work 1950–59

13. Worldwide Practice: The 1960s

14. Was Less Less? 1959–69

15. Recessional: 1962–69

Acknowledgments

Appendix A: Protégés

Appendix B: Mies’s Career, in Publications and Exhibitions

Notes

Bibliographic Afterword

Index

Illustrations

1.1 Odo of Metz, Palatine Chapel, Aachen, interior

1.2 Mies’s birthplace, Aachen

1.3 Town Hall, Aachen, in 1903

1.4 Mies’s parents in 1921

1.5 Mies family tombstone, Aachen

2.1 Riehl House, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg (1907)

2.2 Riehl House, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg, view from garden

2.3 Riehl House, Halle

2.4 Mies at the Riehl House, ca. 1912

2.5 Mies’s earliest known drawings

2.6 Peter Behrens in 1913

2.7 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Neue Wache (1816)

2.8 Schinkel, Charlottenburg New Pavilion (1825)

2.9 Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin (1909)

2.10 Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory, detail

2.11 Bismarck Monument Competition entry (1910)

2.12 Bismarck Monument Competition entry (1910)

2.13 Perls House, Berlin-Zehlendorf (1912–13)

2.14 Perls House, interior

2.15 Behrens, Imperial German Embassy, St. Petersburg, Russia (1911–13)

2.16 Kröller-Müller House project (1912), model

2.17 Kröller-Müller House project, mock-up

2.18 Mies in 1912

2.19 Ada Bruhn in 1903

2.20 Werner House, Berlin-Zehlendorf (1912–13)

2.21 Werner House, interior in 1913

2.22 House of the architect, Werder (1914), aerial perspective drawing

2.23 Urbig House, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg (1917)

3.1 Ada Mies, ca. 1920

3.2 Mies’s children, ca. 1920

3.3 Mies’s apartment, Am Karlsbad Berlin-Mitte, elevation and plan

3.4 Friedrichstrasse Office Building project (1921), perspective drawing

3.5 Glass Skyscraper project (1921), model

3.6 Concrete Country House project (1924), model

3.7 Concrete Country House project, model

3.8 Brick Country House project (1924), perspective and plan

3.9 Concrete Office Building project (1923), drawing

3.10 Mosler House, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg (1926)

3.11 Wolf House, Guben, Germany/Gubin, Poland (1927)

3.12 Wolf House, garden

3.13 Monument to the November Revolution, Berlin-Lichtenberg (1926)

3.14 Ada with the children in 1924

4.1 Weissenhofsiedlung (1927)

4.2 Arab Village, doctored Weissenhofsiedlung photograph

4.3 Weissenhof apartment building (1927)

4.4 LeCorbusier and Mies in Stuttgart, 1926

4.5 Mies and Lilly Reich in 1933

4.6 MR Chair (1927)

4.7 Living room in Plate-Glass Hall, industry and craft exhibition, Stuttgart (1927)

4.8 Esters House, Krefeld (1930)

4.9 Esters House, Krefeld (1930)

4.10 Mies working on the Esters House in 1928

4.11 Alexanderplatz Redevelopment competition, Berlin-Mitte (1929)

4.12 German Pavilion of the International Exposition, Barcelona (1929)

4.13 Barcelona Pavilion, exterior view looking southwest

4.14 Barcelona Pavilion, exterior view looking north

4.15 Barcelona Pavilion, exterior view looking north

4.16 Barcelona Pavilion, interior view 122

4.17 Barcelona chair (1928–29)

4.18 Tugendhat House, Brno, Czechoslovakia, exterior view of main living space (1930)

4.19 Tugendhat House, view from street

4.20 Tugendhat House, main-level living space

4.21 Tugendhat House, dining area

4.22 Tugendhat House, view from garden-side exterior stair

4.23 Tugendhat House, dining table plan

4.24 Tugendhat chair

4.25 Brno chair

4.26 X-table

4.27 Neue Wache War Memorial, Berlin-Mitte (1930), competition entry

5.1 Full-scale model house, Berlin Building Exposition (1931)

5.2 Mies with students at the Dessau Bauhaus, ca. 1930

5.3 Trinkhalle, Dessau (1932)

5.4 Trinkhalle, demolition marker

5.5 Gericke House project (1934), conjectural perspective drawing

5.6 Lemke House, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen (1933)

5.7 Lemke House, rear elevation

5.8 Lilly Reich in 1933

5.9 Reichsbank project, Berlin-Mitte, (1933), plans

5.10 Reichsbank project, elevation

5.11 German Pavilion project (1934), International Exposition, Brussels, main elevation

5.12 German Pavilion project, International Exposition, Brussels, reconstructed conjectural plan

5.13 Hubbe House project (1935), perspective sketch

6.1 Mies and Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin East in 1937

6.2 Resor House project (1938), second-scheme model

7.1 Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago, initial campus plan (1939/40)

7.2 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, revised campus plan (1941)

7.3 Mendelsohn, Peterhans, Hilberseimer and Mies, ca. 1940

7.4 Ludwig Hilberseimer, ca. 1960

7.5 Alfred Caldwell in the late 1950s

8.1 Concert Hall project (1942)

8.2 Metals and Minerals Research Building, IIT (1942)

8.3 Library and Administration Building project, IIT (1944)

8.4 Library and Administration Building project, corner plan detail

8.5 Navy Building, IIT (1946), famous corner

8.6 Navy Building, corner detail 227

8.7 Wishnick Hall, IIT (1946)

8.8 Cantor Drive-In Restaurant, Indianapolis (1946), model

8.9 Cantor Drive-In Restaurant, site plan

9.1 Mies with Lora Marx in 1941

9.2 Mies’s apartment, 200 East Pearson Street, Chicago, plan

9.3 Mies in his apartment in 1956

9.4 Mies exhibition, Museum of Modern Art (1947), plan

9.5 Georgia van der Rohe in 1945

9.6 Marianne Mies van der Rohe in 1935

9.7 Waltraut Mies van der Rohe in 1955

10.1 Edith Farnsworth with Myron Goldsmith in 1950

10.2 Farnsworth House (1951), Plano, Illinois, elevation view

10.3 Farnsworth House, exterior wall detail perspective section

10.4 Farnsworth House, terrace detail 262

10.5 Jerome Nelson

11.1 Mies’s office in 1956

11.2 Mies with Gene Summers in 1956

11.3 Mies with Herbert Greenwald in 1956

11.4 Promontory Apartments, Chicago (1949), east elevation

11.5 Promontory Apartments, colonnade

11.6 Promontory Apartments, alternate scheme

11.7 Algonquin Apartments project, Chicago (1948), model

11.8 860–880 North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago (1951)

11.9 860–880 North Lake Shore Drive, plaza-level view

11.10 Esplanade Apartments, Chicago (1957)

11.11 Lafayette Park, Detroit (1956), site model

11.12 Lafayette Park, Detroit

12.1 3410 South State Building, IIT, with the Mecca, 1951

12.2 S.R. Crown Hall, IIT (1956)

12.3 S.R. Crown Hall, details

12.4 Project for the National Theater, Mannheim, West Germany (1953), model

12.5 Chicago Convention Hall project (1953)

12.6 Mies studying a model of the Convention Hall in 1953

12.7 Arts Club of Chicago, stair (1951)

12.8 Arts Club of Chicago, plan and elevation of alternate scheme (ca. 1950)

12.9 Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel of St. Savior, IIT (1952)

12.10 Carr Memorial Chapel, preliminary schemes

12.11 Commons Building, IIT (1953)

12.12 Philip Johnson, Mies, and Phyllis Lambert in the mid-1950s

12.13 Seagram Building, New York (1958)

12.14 Seagram Building, plan

12.15 Seagram Building, details

13.1 Mies at Epidaurus, Greece, in 1959

13.2 Mies and Lora Marx at Nafplion, Greece, in 1959

13.3 Mies and Ewald Mies in 1961

13.4 Federal Center, Chicago (1964–75)

13.5 Bruno Conterato and Joseph Fujikawa with Mies in 1956

13.6 Ron Bacardi y Compañía project, Santiago, Cuba (1958–60 [canceled]), model

13.7 Ron Bacardi project, details

13.8 Ron Bacardi project, site plan (1958)

13.9 Georg Schaefer Museum project, Schweinfurt, Germany, model

13.10 Bacardi, Schaefer, and Berlin elevations compared

13.11 New National Gallery, Berlin (1968), partial elevation

13.12 New National Gallery, Berlin, main-hall entry

13.13 Mansion House project, London (1967), model

14.1 Home Federal Savings, Des Moines, Iowa (1959), unbuilt version of parking lot attendant’s facility

14.2 Bacardi Administration Building, Mexico City (1961)

14.3 One Charles Center, Baltimore (1962)

14.4 Social Services Administration Building, University of Chicago (1965)

14.5 Engineering Research Building, IIT (1944), elevation detail

14.6 Carr Memorial Chapel, IIT, bench details

15.1 Mies at 200 East Pearson, Chicago, in 1956

15.2 Dirk Lohan in 2005

15.3 Mies showing his art collection in 1956

15.4 Mies with students at IIT in the 1960s

A.1 McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona (1962)

A.2 John Hancock Center, Chicago (1968)

A.3 Inland Steel Building, Chicago (1957)

A.4 Richard J. Daley Center, Chicago (1966)

A.5 McCormick Place, Chicago (1971)

A.6 Lake Point Tower, Chicago (1969)

Preface

A quarter century has passed since the 1985 release of Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, by Franz Schulze. In the intervening years, so much new material has emerged that it is time for this new and expanded edition, by coauthors Schulze and architect Edward Windhorst. Our text addresses its subject in substantially different form from other recent scholarship on Mies. Most important is our analytical and critical commentary on his built and unbuilt work. We subject Mies’s buildings and projects to sometimes intensive examination, chiefly from an architect’s perspective and only secondarily in the context of a broader art historical narrative. And while we believe in the excellence of Mies’s building art, we offer negative assessments where called for.

In matters biographical, we have uncovered facts that significantly extend and clarify what is known of Mies’s career. By our own efforts, and with the help of colleagues—and happy accident—we have identified the architect’s earliest known drawings, studies for the design of his first house. And in a major find that corrects and illuminates the story of one of the architect’s seminal buildings, the Farnsworth House, we have for the first time located and analyzed the transcript of the famous trial that pitted Mies against his client, Edith Farnsworth. The struggle that played out in the courtroom of a small Illinois town during the early 1950s is brought to life in this document, which discloses new information about Mies’s design intentions, the history of the house, and the relationship of architect to client. The six hundred pages of Mies’s transcribed testimony constitute an unequaled cache of his talk and thinking.

Our new and revised edition addresses a number of topics touched on slightly or not at all in the first: details of the relationship between Mies and the developer Herbert Greenwald; the workings of Mies’s American office and the role played by significant figures in his employ, among them Bruno Conterato, Edward Duckett, Joseph Fujikawa, Myron Goldsmith, Dirk Lohan, and Gene Summers; the activity of fellow faculty in Germany and Chicago, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Walter Peterhans, and Alfred Caldwell; the character of Mies’s commitment to architectural education and his effectiveness as a teacher; his understanding of the arts of painting and sculpture, with special attention to his collecting; and information, newly learned, about his family and romantic attachments. We also use significant additional material from candid interviews with Mies’s American companion, Lora Marx, conducted by one of us (Schulze). We have much more to say in this edition about Mies’s personal and professional relationship with his colleague Lilly Reich; about his well-known interest in philosophy; and about the intellectual background of his European years. Our closing chapter treats Mies’s personality and character as perceived by his American students, colleagues, friends, and adversaries, and a major appendix examines some of the best buildings of his most important students and followers. A second appendix recounts and assesses the history of Mies’s reception by scholars and in exhibitions, while finally, a brief after-word lists the most important publications with Mies as subject.

We have undertaken this project respectful of other major publications with Mies as principal subject. They include Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Furniture and Furniture Drawings from the Design Collection and the Mies van der Rohe Archive, the Museum of Modern Art (1977), by Ludwig Glaeser; Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses (1985), by Wolf Tegethoff; The Mies van der Rohe Archive, an illustrated catalog of the Mies drawings in the Museum of Modern Art, in twenty volumes, four edited by Arthur Drexler (1986) and sixteen by one of us (Schulze) and George E. Danforth (1990, 1992); and Fritz Neumeyer’s The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art (1991). We are also indebted to substantial volumes that accompanied exhibitions: Mies in Berlin (2001), edited by Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, and Mies in America (2001), edited by Phyllis Lambert.

Our own work occupies what we believe to be a unique place in Miesian scholarship. The above-mentioned studies have each concentrated on specific aspects of the Mies story rather than all of it. This book concerns itself in depth with the man and his architecture. Insofar as Mies can be treated in a single volume, we have attempted to be synoptic.

Prologue

The subject of this study is the most remarkable two-act career in modern architecture. By the late 1920s, still in his early forties, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, third son of a provincial stonemason—had become the leading architectural representative of Germany’s avant-garde. A combination of talent, will, and extraordinary self-education had already produced two of the architectural masterpieces of the twentieth century: the German Pavilion of the Barcelona International Exposition (1929), commonly known as the Barcelona Pavilion, and the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia (1930).

As it turned out, these two buildings were the last material triumphs of a European career that would last almost another decade. During that span a world economic crisis and the related rise of German National Socialism destroyed the modernist program in central Europe. By the mid-1930s, his professional future in grave doubt, Mies could no longer afford to ignore invitations tendered by academic institutions outside Germany. In 1938 he finally accepted a faculty position in Chicago. Yet sudden and unexpected pressure from the Gestapo turned an orderly move into a race for the border.

Mies the émigré could count himself lucky and luckless. Both his destination and promise of livelihood were the fruits of his international reputation. But he was fifty-two years old, and his only language was German. He had left behind, perhaps forever, family and colleagues; he was also forced to abandon an architectural practice and a hard-won professional independence of twenty years’ standing. It was a difficult end to his life in Europe, and an uncertain beginning to the final chapter of his career.

It is a marvel that Mies, having put down roots in the United States, shortly emerged as a force in American architecture. As an educator at Illinois Institute of Technology and as the designer of a modern campus for that school, he was at last building on a large scale and with authentic artistic freedom. A return to Germany was unthinkable; he liked America, and America liked him.

During his second career, Mies believed that he had developed a new architectural language—a set of principles and methods that could be taught and passed on within the profession, reflecting the realities, values, and possibilities of what he called the epoch. Using this language, during the 1950s and 1960s he produced a series of masterworks, beginning with the celebrated Lake Shore Drive Apartments and the Farnsworth House, continuing with S.R. Crown Hall, the Seagram Building, and Chicago’s Federal Center, and ending, in a poignant personal circle, with the New National Gallery in Berlin.

Though he insisted on the objectivity of his architecture and especially the central role of what he termed a clear structure, it is now evident, four decades after his death, that Mies’s architecture was personal and inimitable, and that his finest works were the product of his own searching solitude. The epoch of glass and steel associated with Mies would be brief; new technologies and new performance imperatives rendered his steel-and-glass tectonics obsolete even before his death. Yet his buildings, projects, professional influence, and educational and personal legacy remain. Their elucidation and celebration are the aim of this book.

1

Youth in Imperial Germany: 1886–1905

We made drawings the size of a whole quarter of a room ceiling, which we would then send on to the model makers. I did this every day for two years. Even now I can draw cartouches with my eyes closed.

MIES, recalling his on-the-job education

Go to Berlin; that’s where things are happening.

ARCHITECT DÜLOW, advising his friend Ludwig Mies

Nothing about Mies’s early life prefigures significant professional achievement. Aachen, Germany, where he was born and grew up, was and had been a provincial city for centuries. Until adulthood he never traveled more than a few miles beyond its borders. His forebears, stonemasons for generations, were proud of their calling, but only as ambitious as the trade required. His formal education was comparably limited. Any native intellectual or creative gift, even if evident, was unlikely to have been nurtured by those around him. Thus, he remained in Aachen until he was nineteen, living with his parents and following a predetermined path of long standing.

Though in reputation Aachen then ranked below a dozen other German cities, it looked back on an impressive history. Late in the eighth century, Charlemagne made it the center of his empire, the first great unified state in northern Europe, a domain that extended from the Pyrenees to Saxony and from the North Sea to Rome. Scholars of the Carolingian court generated the earliest major revival of the classical spirit in the West. Charlemagne’s personal identification with the emperors of Rome, together with his passionate admiration of Roman culture—and the fateful alliance he forged with the pope—contributed seminally to the shape of the Middle Ages and the emergence of the Renaissance.

Aachen was the site of Charlemagne’s long-vanished palace, which stood across a courtyard from the splendid ninth-century domed chapel that survives (fig. 1.1). Designed by Odo of Metz after the example of the Byzantine Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, it was the most sophisticated northern European building of its time, and served as the coronation hall for German kings for six hundred years. Mies knew the chapel as a boy and remembered it as a man. He had stood in awe of the powerful piers and the octagonal dome they support: One could apprehend everything that went on. The whole space was a unity, everywhere alive with the sights and sounds of the ceremony, even the smells of it.¹ Late in life he recalled accompanying his mother to morning Mass, where he sat in rapt silence, transfixed by the mighty stones that make up the piers and arches.

FIGURE 1.1. Interior of the Palatine Chapel, Aachen, begun in 792 and consecrated by Pope Leo III in 805. Designed for Charlemagne by Odo of Metz, the octagonal domed chapel is the most important surviving example of Carolingian architecture. Mies’s family worshipped here when he was a child. Photo courtesy of M. Jeiter.

The cathedral proper, of which the chapel is a part, consists of a fifteenth-century Gothic choir surrounded by a veritable wall of glass surmounted by spidery vaults. It stands in the oldest part of town, a maze of narrow streets and medieval houses mostly of brick, intimately related to the building traditions of Holland and Belgium, the borders of which lie within walking distance of Aachen’s city limits. Mies described these anonymous buildings with embracing affection: "Mostly simple, but very clear. . . . [They] did not belong to any epoch. . . . [They] had been there for a thousand years and were still impressive. . . . All the great styles passed, but they remained. . . . They were really built."² This is mature Miesian sentiment as we know it from published pronouncements: affirmation of clarity and simplicity in the design and construction of buildings, especially as apparent over the reach of time, balanced by the negation of individuality and style.

Yet there was much of style and clamorous change in the Aachen of Mies’s youth, especially in parts he would have known better than the chapel and its environs. He was born March 27, 1886, in a house at Steinkaulstrasse 29 (fig. 1.2). His family moved several times during his childhood, but remained in the same neighborhood until he was fifteen; it is therefore likely that in the 1890s he witnessed the rebuilding of the Oppenhoffallee, a kilometer to the south. The Oppenhoffallee was and remains an elegant boulevard lined by buildings characteristic of Wilhelmine architectural decoration at its most unbridled. At the time of Mies’s birth, less than a generation after unification and victory over the French in 1870, Germany had taken on a new national identity bound up with military power. National pride and confidence swelled during the eighties and nineties, and along with it ambition, abetted by the explosively swift pace of German industrialization.

Aachen fully bore out the image. In 1825 its population was 35,428. By 1886, at Mies’s birth, it passed 100,000, and by 1905, when he left for good, it was 145,000. While Aachen continued to enjoy the tourist trade that had been drawn to its hot sulfur springs since Roman times (Aachen means water in Old German), it now witnessed a flash growth of industry. Traditionally a textile center, in the years following German unification it exploited the extensive nearby coalfields. By the 1890s, the largest and best-equipped steelworks in Germany, Aachen’s Rothe Erde, employed five thousand workers.

This furious activity was reflected in institutional proliferation. The Technical Institute (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule) was founded in 1870, eventually gaining a reputation as the most distinguished traditionally oriented architecture school in northwestern Germany. (Mies might have studied there had his family been inclined and able to send him.) A main post office was completed in 1893, in neo-Romanesque style, with a portal flanked by larger-than-life statues of Kaiser Wilhelm I and Charlemagne. Twelve years later, the new train station opened, its Jugendstil—the German equivalent of art nouveau—reflecting the latest in turn-of-the-century fashion. The municipal trolley system was electrified in 1892, and motion pictures were shown at the Kurhaus as early as 1896. The fourteenth-century Town Hall, a huge edifice built on the foundations of Charlemagne’s palace and badly damaged by fire in 1883, was redesigned three years later and rebuilt by 1903, its two towers inflated to the grandiose scale beloved of the period (fig. 1.3).

FIGURE 1.2. Steinkaulstrasse 29, Aachen, birthplace of Mies van der Rohe. Photo by Tim Brown (Creative Commons).

.   .   .

Most of the little we know of Mies’s family background is gleaned from records in the Aachen Stadtarchiv. As far back as can be traced—the late eighteenth century—his family on both sides were Catholics of German stock who lived close to the Dreiländereck, the three-country corner where Holland, Belgium, Germany, and their respective cultures meet. His father, Michael Mies, was the first of either line born in Aachen proper, in 1851. Michael’s father, Jakob, born in Blankenheim in the Eifel in 1814, first appears in the 1855 Aachen address book as a marble carver. Amalie Rohe, Mies’s mother, was born in Monschau, a picturesque suburb of Aachen, in 1843. She was eight years older than Michael Mies, and thirty-three when they married in 1876 (fig. 1.4).

During the 1870s, Jakob Mies shared a marble business and atelier with his son Carl, Michael’s older brother, at Adalbertstrasse 116. Michael, who joined the business later, is listed in the 1875 address book as a marble worker. His name does not appear again until the edition of 1880, and by then his marriage to Amalie had produced a male child, Ewald Philipp, born October 13, 1877, first son, heir and Stammhalter (preserver of the line), a familial designation of considerable importance in nineteenth-century Germany.

Michael and Amalie now lived at Steinkaulstrasse 29, where their other four children were born: Carl Michael, second oldest, born May 18, 1879 (died aged two, the cause unrecorded); Anna Maria Elisabeth, born September 16, 1881; Maria Johanna Sophie, born December 30, 1883; and the youngest, Maria Ludwig Michael, who would become Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the early 1920s, when by his own lights he linked his father’s and mother’s surnames with the invented van der.

The Steinkaulstrasse is outside and east of the limits of Aachen’s ancient second wall (today replaced by streets), not far from the Adalbertsteinweg (a continuation of the Adalbertstrasse), where Michael, listed as a master mason by 1883, and Carl, identified as a sculptor, took over the family business after their father’s death about 1888. This was the fastest-growing part of Aachen in the 1880s and 1890s. Rents were still low, and it was close to the city’s cemeteries, an important factor for a business specializing in gravestones.

FIGURE 1.3. Town Hall, Aachen, in 1903. Constructed in the Gothic manner in the fourteenth century, it was renovated a number of times, each in the style of the day. Two baroque-era flanking towers and most of the roof were lost in a fire in 1883. In 1886 a restoration was carried out to the neo-Gothic plans of Darmstadt architect Friedrich Puetzer. Photo: Stadtarchiv Aachen.

FIGURE 1.4. Mies’s parents, Amalie, née Rohe (1843–1928), and Michael Mies (1851–1927), in 1921. Private collection.

Within the Mies enterprise, Michael ran the studio and Carl handled sales. There were frequent trips to Paris and occasionally even as far as North African quarries. By 1893 two new cemeteries had opened on the west side of Aachen, prompting Michael to establish a branch there in 1895. By 1901 he and his eldest, the twenty-four-year-old Ewald, now also a master mason, had moved family and studio to the Vaalserstrasse, the road to the Netherlands.

Ludwig was then fifteen. His family was middle-class—more exactly craftsman/middle-class—in the preindustrial sense of the term; Michael Mies’s children were at home with objects and craft rather than ideas and commerce. Uncle Carl was the salesman during the heady 1880s, but father Michael was always happiest with the tools of his trade.

.   .   .

The chief source of what we know of early experiences pertinent to Mies’s professional destiny is a 1968 conversation with his grandson, the architect Dirk Lohan:

Lohan: When you were very young, were you obliged to help in the family atelier?

Mies: I did it for the fun of it. And always when we had vacations. I especially remember that on All Souls Day, when so many people wanted new monuments for the graves, our whole family pitched in. I did the lettering on the stones, my brother did the carving, and my sisters put the finishing touches on them, the gold leaf, and all that. I don’t think we added very much to the process, but it probably was a little better for it.³

Mies described his father as a craftsman reluctant to act the businessman, who collided unavoidably with changing times and values: About the economics of capitalist speculation he understood nothing. ‘To make this thing,’ he would say to a customer, ‘I need three weeks. And it will cost so-and-so much, to be paid when I deliver it.’ That was the craftsman’s way, not the merchant’s. There was no room in it for flexibility, for consideration of long-term profits as opposed to short-term gains, that could carry the business over hard times. On Mies’s visits home after he moved to Berlin, he listened to Ewald debate their father. My brother would say, ‘Look, we can produce such-and-such an ornament without all that fuss, especially if it is way up high on a building façade where no one can look closely at it.’ My father wanted no part of that. ‘You’re none of you stonemasons anymore!’ he would say. ‘You know the finial at the top of the spire of the cathedral at Cologne? Well, you can’t crawl up there and get a good look at it, but it is carved as if you could. It was made for God.’⁴

Despite Michael’s reverence for tradition, he could not afford to live in the past; Germany’s industrial revolution and the kaiser’s new empire saw to that. Since the passing of the guild system, training in the crafts had moved to schools, where a dash of theory had been added to the rule of thumb. Ludwig, aged ten, was sent off from the elementary to the cathedral school, which he attended from 1896 to 1899. We surmise that he was a promising student, since the cathedral school enjoyed a substantial reputation throughout the Rhineland. Yet late in life he told an interviewer that he was not very good, implying that his abilities were more practical than intellectual.⁵ At thirteen he might have been finished with schooling altogether, but his father sent him on—as he had Ewald—for two years at the Spenrathschule, the trade school, having secured a full-tuition scholarship for each, thereby indicating his faith in their schooling to the limits of the family’s ambition and circumstances.

The trade school, Mies recollected, was not the same as a crafts school. It offered the kind of two-year course that would enable a graduate to get a job in an office or a workshop. Great stress was laid on drawing, because it was something everybody had to know. You understand, the curriculum was no theoretically contrived program. It was based on experience, on the sort of thing tradesmen really had to use. He added that Aachen had other technical schools of a higher level, with four-year programs, like the machine construction and building construction schools. He also mentioned the Hochschule, which offered a theoretical curriculum. Yet his heart belonged to those practically trained: "They were flawless in their work habits. I would rather have dealt with them than with anyone from the Hochschule. They could draw expertly—a roof frame for example, that was perfect in detail. What you needed on a job, that is what they learned to do, masterfully."⁶

Mies was eighty-two when these words were recorded, and had long since rationalized his training. That he never matriculated at the Aachen Hochschule may in part explain his sympathy with architectural education grounded in the facts of building. If he had little formal learning, he earned his calluses, and he deeply valued his experience at job sites and in shops following trade school. Signing on at fifteen, he worked for a year as an apprentice at local building sites and then, for four years, as a draftsman in several Aachen ateliers. He recalled the way houses were put up in his youth:

Someone dug the foundation and laid the mortar bed, slaked the lime and let it run down there. Then came the bricks. That’s where we started. We didn’t have concrete, at least not for these house foundations, which were made of brick, first laid dry, with no binder, then covered with mortar. We had to make our own mortar and carry it on shoulder boards shaped like half-cylinders. We loaded bricks and stones in them too, using one hand to hold the board pole steady, the other to help ourselves up the ladder. Whoever could carry the most was cock of the walk.

Once you were there, on the wall, it was good. You learned to work slowly, not like some wild animal that gets tired after fifteen minutes, but quietly, for hours and hours. If you were really experienced, you learned how to do corners, which was very complicated. Mostly we laid the bricks in cross bond, and now and then we’d make mistakes. The foreman would often just let us make them and carry on. Then we’d get a wall up a way and he would say, O.K., that’s wrong. Take the whole thing down. Finally, when we were finished, the carpenters would show up and we were shifted to the vital assignment of getting the water for the workmen’s coffee.

We had little pots, and we could buy boiling water for them for two Pfennige. We’d put powdered coffee into the pot, pour the water over it and deliver it to the workers. We could also get sausage for five Pfennige. Or cheese. Cheese was the staple. Bread you brought from home. The Schnaps came later. At the end of the week, when people got paid, that’s when you got your Schnaps, lots of it, five Pfennige a shot.

At this point in his narrative Mies was not sixteen, and had yet to collect a day’s pay. It was time to end the boy’s schooling, at least as supported by the family. So Ludwig asked the supervisor of the apartment house project where he was working if he could be put on wages.

Of course the boss said no. He had had me for a year for nothing: why should he give me money now?

As it happened, I had a friend, a school chum, who knew of someone in town who needed a draftsman. I could draw. I had learned it at school. And I was good at lettering, with all that work on the tombstones behind me. So I applied to be a draftsman in a stucco factory run by a man named Max Fischer.

I got the job, though they put me in the office, not the atelier, and I had to keep the books and lick the postage stamps and get on a bicycle to take the wages to the workers at the construction sites. This I did for at least half a year.

Then the chief draftsman was called into the army and I was promoted to the drafting room. If I thought I knew how to draw before, I really learned now. We had huge drawing boards that went from floor to ceiling and stood vertically against the wall. You couldn’t lean on or against them; you had to stand squarely in front of them and draw not just by turning your hand but by swinging your whole arm. We made drawings the size of a whole quarter of a room ceiling, which we would then send on to the model makers. I did this every day for two years. Even now I can draw cartouches with my eyes closed.

Lohan: You worked in all styles?

Mies: All historical styles, plus modern. All conceivable ornaments.

Lohan: Did you design any yourself?

Mies: When I was able—which is not as easy as it might sound.

Mies made a sudden departure from the stucco workshop. His boss, angry about a drawing mistake, made an abrupt, unexpectedly threatening gesture. Mies stiffened. Don’t try that again, he warned. The man backed off. Mies packed his things and left. Mind you, he told Lohan, the police were sent to haul me back, as if I were an apprentice and he owned me! But I was a novice draftsman. There is a difference! Mies had his pride. My brother knew who I was as well as I, and when the cops arrived, he was there to tell them so, in no uncertain terms. ‘Go home,’ he said, and they went. Nothing more came of it. I was finished with the man and the job.

FIGURE 1.5. Mies family tombstone, West Cemetery, Aachen (1929), designed and executed by Ewald Mies. Mies’s stonemason brother was an outstanding craftsman. The clarity, directness, and economy of Ewald’s work is characteristically Miesian.

Mies had an ardent affection for his older brother, to whom he was at all times closer than to either of his parents or his sisters. Ewald was guardian and spiritual counselor. The brothers shared interests and talents, especially for what is today called graphic design. The family monument in Aachen’s Westfriedhof, planned and executed by Ewald in 1929,⁷ is a masterly example of modernist sans serif graphics, with the understated refinement that marks the work of his famous brother (fig. 1.5).

Ewald remained an Aachener all his life, and never married. Ludwig was ambitious, and the skill he demonstrated in the Fischer workshop made a return to the family stone yard unlikely. Between 1901 and 1905, according to his papers, he worked for two architects in Aachen, the first identified only as Architect Goebbels, the second Albert Schneider, Architect. The dates of these employments are not known. During the same four-year period he attended what he described as Evening and Sunday Vocational School while working full-time and living at home.

I somehow made contact, he told Lohan,

with the office of an architect [presumably Schneider] in Aachen who was designing a big department store downtown, a branch of the Tietz Company. He had conceived a highly ornamental façade for the building, but his reach was greater than his grasp; he couldn’t draw it. He asked me if I could. I said, Yes. He wanted to know how long it would take. I said, Do you want it this evening? Or do I have a little more time? He looked at me as if I were a fraud for promising to do it so fast. Give it to me tomorrow, he said, and I did. Then he asked me to work for him.

Meanwhile, Tietz had decided to transfer control of the department store project to the large Berlin firm of Bossler and Knorr, demoting Mies’s boss Schneider to the role of associate. A battalion of architects, engineers, and clerical assistants descended on the Aachen office, and Mies found himself consorting with sophisticated invaders from the metropolis. His efforts met their standards.

Lohan: The story has it that someone in the office gave you the idea of moving to Berlin.

Mies: It was an architect named Dülow, from Königsberg, an admirer of Schopenhauer. He invited me one evening for dinner. It was Schopenhauer’s birthday. The fact is I was not very educated in that sort of thing.

Enlarging on the same story in an interview with his daughter Georgia, he said: "On the day I was assigned to a drawing table at Schneider’s, I was cleaning it out when I came across a copy of Die Zukunft [The Future], a journal published by Maximilian Harden, plus an essay on one of Laplace’s theories. I read both of them and both of them went quite over my head. But I couldn’t help being interested. So every week thereafter, I got hold of Die Zukunft and read it as carefully as I could. That’s when I started paying attention to spiritual things. Philosophy. And culture."⁸

To Lohan, Mies continued:

In the course of the evening Dülow said to me, Listen, why do you want to hang around here, in this tank town? Go to Berlin; that’s where things are happening. I said, That’s easier said than done. I can’t just buy a train ticket, head for Berlin and stand around the Potsdamer Bahnhof without the faintest idea of where to go.

So he pulled out an architectural journal, Die Bauwelt, or some such, from his desk drawer. There were two classified ads in it, both for draftsmen, one for the new town hall in Rixdorf, the other for general work at the big Berlin firm of Reinhardt and Süssenguth. Send drawings, the ad said—nothing more, no diplomas, no recommendations. So I sent them a pile of things and got an offer from both places. The Rixdorf project promised two hundred Marks a month, forty less than the other one. But Dülow said, Take Rixdorf; I have a good friend who is in charge of the project there. His name is Martens, a fine man, from the Baltic, painstaking architect . . . above all, an artist.

It was time for the train to Berlin. With his departure, Mies effectively relinquished any claim to the family business. His brother would assume full ownership following the deaths of Michael in 1927 and Amalie five months later, in 1928. Over the years the Aachen address book regularly listed Ewald as a stonemason, though now and then he advertised himself as an architect. He had no training in the field, though in Germany as late as the 1920s hanging out a shingle was a legally acceptable way of identifying oneself as a professional designer of buildings.⁹

.   .   .

Consistent with the male domination of Wilhelmine society, the women of the Mies family appear only indistinctly. When Mies spoke of his mother, as he did in recalling visits with her to the cathedral, he was affectionate and respectful but vague. His sisters, Elise and Maria, hardly appear in recorded recollections. They were both still single when they opened a grocery store in 1911 on the Vaalserstrasse, just a few doors from the family residence. The store survived into the 1950s. Elise was past fifty at the time she married Johann Josef Blees, a widower with a teenage son. Maria never married.

In old age, Mies claimed to have little recall of family life during his childhood, which he attributed to his early departure from home at the age of nineteen. His father was a strict authoritarian whom his mother obeyed dutifully. He said he had little sense of the relation he had had with his parents. Nonetheless, he remembered his father’s scolding: Don’t read these dumb books. Work.¹⁰

Whatever we make of the fragmentary record of Mies’s early life, none of it points to exceptional promise. His chief source of confidence was ability as a draftsman, a gift sufficient to impress professionals he met while still a teenager. At nineteen he was unaccustomed to long-distance train travel, still less to a destination as formidable as the capital of the German Empire. Thirty miles under way he developed acute nausea, which subsided only slightly at the first stop, Cologne. Around 8:15, Mies recalled in the Lohan interview, the train started up again, and at 8:16, I opened the window, stuck my head out, and threw up. His distress persisted until he felt Berlin beneath his feet, though as soon as he mounted a taxi headed for Rixdorf he lost his stomach again. He deserted the cab, sat down on a curbstone, and waited for the return of equilibrium. Hoisting himself onto a trolley, he endured long enough to reach his immediate destination, the office of the municipal building department.

2

Apprenticeship, Marriage, and World War: 1905–18

But I can build a house. I just haven’t done it on my own.

MIES, to his first client

A huge stone wall with windows cut out of it. And that is that. You see with how few means you can make architecture—and what an architecture!

MIES, remembering the Palazzo Pitti in Florence

I want to love you with my hot young heart.

MIES, courting Ada Bruhn

There was something about him that thrived on freedom, required exemption from convention.

MARY WIGMAN, of Mies

Though within the orbit of Berlin, Rixdorf was independent and growing fast enough to require a new town hall. A picturesque design by the architect Reinhold Kiehl¹ was then under construction, and Mies was assigned to detail Kiehl’s neo-Gothic paneling for the Council Chamber. At least for the drafting, Mies’s work in the Fischer studio left him well prepared. But as he later reminisced, the details were wood, and for all the time I had already spent with stone and brick and mortar and all such, I had never properly learned to handle wood, neither in school nor at home nor during my apprentice year in Aachen.² But his labors were soon interrupted by a stint, as a draftee, in the imperial German army.

One day not long after induction . . . , he recalled,

we were ordered out onto the drill field for exercises. It was raining pitilessly, and the water kept rolling in torrents off our helmets—those comical old things with the spikes on them. When we heard the command Attention! one of the poor recruits in the first row of our unit was thoughtless enough to reach up and wipe the water from his face. At this the drill sergeant flew into a rage. It was a breach of discipline, not to be tolerated. The company captain was equally furious, since it had happened in his outfit. So we were all ordered to do calisthenics in the pouring rain, for hour after hour until eight o’clock that night. It was utterly imbecilic, the whole thing, so much soldier nonsense, and its main effect was that next morning I was unable to get out of bed. I couldn’t move. I was in terrible shape—not only me, but half a dozen others. We were all hauled off to the hospital, where it turned out I had developed a bad lung infection.

Since the army still had loads of healthy bodies and didn’t really need us cripples, I was discharged as unfit for service. I never went back to Rixdorf.³

In late 1905 or early 1906, Mies resumed his study of wood, and considerably more. He secured a connection, first as an employee, then as a student, with one of the most remarkable and versatile spirits in the German art world of the period, and the first figure of historic consequence in his life: Bruno Paul.

After completing his studies in Dresden in 1894, Paul had moved to Munich, then Germany’s most progressive arts center. The Bavarian capital was at the heart of a gathering revolt against the imperialist-materialist values of late nineteenth-century European civilization. For Paul, the way of the 1890s was the Jugendstil. Its serpentine line and flat, abstracted patterns offered an alternative to the recycled manners of the 1880s, not just in painting and sculpture but in the utilitarian arts as well. Paul was also an accomplished illustrator. From 1894 to 1907, the social liberalism and bold, protoexpressionism of his contributions to the Munich satirical journal Simplicissimus epitomized the antiestablishment position.

During the first decade of the new century, Paul turned to architecture and applied arts, especially furniture. In 1904, when the German design section of the St. Louis World’s Fair won worldwide praise, critics hailed him as one of the most impressive members of the group. He distinguished himself further in 1906, with several crisply geometrized interiors at the Third German Industrial and Applied Arts Exhibition in Dresden.

By 1907 Paul had moved to Berlin, then eclipsing Munich as the artistic capital of the nation. There he was appointed head of the education department of the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Art), a position of considerable authority within the German academic bureaucracy. An irony attaches to this, as to other affiliations that grew out of the collision of radical and traditional forces in a time of abrupt cultural transition. The kaiser, though he professed appreciation for the arts, was aesthetically and politically archconservative. Had he known of Paul’s Simplicissimus drawings, the appointment would surely have been blocked. Paul, as aware of this as anyone, continued to draw for Simplicissimus under the alias Kellermann.

Paul was one of the twelve founding members of the Deutscher Werkbund. Created in 1907, the Werkbund developed into a major progressivist force for German art, crafts, and architecture. It worked to improve the quality of all artifacts, a mission that grew out of the English Arts and Crafts movement, whose principal spirit, William Morris, deplored the dehumanizing effects of machine production on the handicrafts. While the Arts and Crafts movement took inspiration from medieval craft models, the Werkbund promoted improvements in both handmade and industrial goods, with the ultimate goal of aligning all artifacts with the cultural aspirations of German society. In further evidence of English influence on German design, Berlin architect Hermann Muthesius published the monumental Das englische Haus (1904–5), in which he argued that English domestic architecture excelled in comfort, informality, and economy of means, assets comparing favorably with the historicist ostentation of German residential design during the effusive 1880s.

The German vanguard of the new century also embraced stylistic restraint under the banner Sachlichkeit—a combination of matter-of-factness, objectivity, and sobriety. By 1905 a new language of form with its own iconography was in place. Geometric forms replaced the organic curves of Jugendstil, and a simplified neoclassicism now represented the virtues of clarity and reserve. Bruno Paul’s work moved toward an understated precision that recalled early nineteenth-century Biedermeier.

.   .   .

Mies worked for Paul and also enrolled in both of Paul’s Berlin schools. He took quickly and enthusiastically to furniture design, and even tried printmaking. One day in 1906, while working on a woodcut in the studio of Joseph Popp,⁴ an assistant to the painter Emil Orlik, Mies observed a smartly dressed woman enter the room. She approached Popp and asked for assistance in the design of a birdbath for her lawn. Popp apparently complied to her satisfaction, for some weeks later she returned with a more ambitious request. She and her husband, Alois Riehl, professor of philosophy at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, wanted to build a house in the upper-class Berlin suburb of Neubabelsberg.⁵ Not interested in an established architect, the couple hoped to advance the career of a gifted young designer. Popp nominated Mies—not yet twenty-one—and made the introductions.

Mies continued the story in his interview with Lohan. Frau Riehl asked what he had designed himself. "I said, ‘nothing.’ Then she answered, ‘that will not do. We don’t want to be guinea pigs.’ But, I said, I can build a house. I just haven’t done it on my own. What would life be like if everybody insisted you must have actually built such-and-such a thing by yourself? I’d be an old man and have nothing to show for the aging. Then she laughed, and said she wanted me to meet her husband."⁶

Frau Riehl then announced that she and her husband were hosting a formal dinner party that very evening. She invited Mies.

I’ll never forget it. First [Popp] told me I’d have to have a dinner jacket. I had no idea what a dinner jacket was. So he said, You can buy one anywhere, or perhaps rent one.

Well, I went around Paul’s office from A to Z, borrowing money until I had enough to buy a dinner jacket. Then of course I didn’t know what sort of cravat to wear, and I picked up some wild thing in yellow or something else equally crazy. When the evening came I went to the Riehls’ apartment in Berlin and there was a pair of people in the elevator with me. Very fancily dressed, the man in tails and covered all over with medals. I figured they must be going where I was going, so I let them get off first. Then the door opened and I felt almost dizzy. I saw how they glided, zumm zumm zumm, across the parquet like ice-skaters, and I was afraid I might break my neck. Then came the host, moving easily from one person to the next and greeting them. It was remarkable.

After dinner [Professor Riehl] invited me to the library, where he asked me all kinds of questions. Then he said, We don’t want the other guests to wait long and we’ll go back to the salon. Then to his wife: This one will build our house. This came as a shock to her. She didn’t quite trust her husband, so she asked if she could meet with me the next day. I told her I was working for Bruno Paul, who wants me to build a tennis pavilion for him, a clubhouse. Why don’t you ask him what he thinks of me. And he told me later that she said, You know Mies is talented, but he is very young, and lacking in experience.

Bruno Paul suggested that I could work on the design in his own office. I said no. He asked how I found the nerve to say that. You see, he just didn’t understand. Well, I got the assignment. And when the house was finished, he asked me for photographs of it that he could include in one of his student exhibitions. I was told later that he said to someone, The house has only one thing wrong with it—that I didn’t build it. He was very decent to me, in no way small-minded.

While the design of the Riehl House owes more to custom than originality, it is a remarkable accomplishment, the product of a neophyte with a few years’ experience as a draftsman (figs. 2.1 and 2.2). The plan and elevations and especially the siting and landscaping disclose a fully professional achievement.

The house, at Spitzweggasse 3, is stucco over load-bearing masonry, with a steeply pitched, tiled roof above a rectangular main volume, wholly in the tradition of modest villas common to Potsdam-Neubabelsberg. It recalls specifically the treatment of the eaves and the low-relief pilasters on the façade of Paul’s Westend House in Berlin, which was in design at the time. There are two principal elevations: one the entrance, block-like on the southeast overlooking a partially walled level lawn, the other, on the northwest side, a four-columned loggia capped by a gabled roof surveying a slope and a stand of trees. The loggia overlooks Lake Griebnitz, the shore of which is about five hundred feet to the east–northeast. Below and extending from both ends of the loggia elevation is a tall, broad retaining wall running almost the width of the site. A basement with a secondary entrance is concealed behind this wall, and is reached from a walkway running along the sloping lawn.

FIGURE 2.1. Alois and Sophie Riehl House, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg (1907). The Riehl house is Mies’s first realized building, designed on his own when he was twenty-one. The clients were a respected Berlin philosophy professor and his wife. The Riehls developed an abiding fondness for Mies and brought him into their family and social circle. It was Mies’s first encounter with high society and success.

The siting offers attractively contrasting vistas: one at street level, to the tidy, formally planted lawn, the other to the broad slope and distant views. The plan is clear and the interior design, for the period, restrained. The great room, or Halle, of the first floor is similar to English domestic models celebrated by Muthesius (fig. 2.3). However, if England was the indirect antecedent of the Halle plan, its more immediate decorative source was the dining room that Paul had designed for the 1906 Dresden exhibition. The wooden lattice that Mies used as a wall motif, together with a blank frieze and the absence of a dado, produced a more formal, abstract (and less costly) effect than the work of his teacher. Elsewhere, Mies adopted the new vocabulary of the time: neo-Biedermeier wooden crossbars on the glazed cabinets again point to Paul, and a decorative swag over the front door is traceable to illustrations in one of the books widely discussed in Germany at the time, Paul Mebes’s Um 1800.⁷ Mebes opposed the formal excesses of recent domestic designs and called for a return to the simpler houses of the earlier nineteenth century.

For Mies, the real legacy of the Riehl commission was the relationship he developed with his formidable clients (fig. 2.4). Alois Riehl, sixty-three years old when the house was completed, was a figure of consequence in German philosophy and the wider cultural community of Berlin. He was an important neo-Kantian, a prolific author, and an early scholar and expositor of Friedrich Nietzsche. Once he and his wife, Sophie, took possession of their new house, which they named Klösterli (Little Cloister), they used it to entertain fellow elites. Mies, the young provincial, found special favor with the Riehls and was welcome in their midst ever after. While his lately developed interest in philosophy certainly appealed to Riehl, it hardly accounts for the depth of the professor’s affection. Mies’s evidently attractive personality surely played a role. In a gesture both paternalistic and didactic, the Riehls, at their expense, sent Mies on a six-week tour through Germany to Italy in 1908. There he was able to study landmarks he could only have dreamed of while in Aachen.

Mies was accompanied by Joseph Popp:

We headed to Munich, where there was an exhibition. . . . We were advised to visit it, since Frau Riehl liked it, and she just wanted us to observe whatever would improve our knowledge. It was a very interesting trip. For my taste Popp went too often to museums, to look at paintings. I can understand that, but I preferred myself to stay outdoors and look the city over. It was wonderful. We then went over the Brenner Pass to Bozen [Bolzano, in Italian] and from there on the way to Vicenza, where Palladio had built so much. Some of his most important buildings were in this area. Wonderful villas, not only the Rotonda, which is very formal, but others that are freer. The beautiful villa on the Wannsee, by [Alfred] Messel, reminded me of a villa by Palladio near Vicenza.⁸ Both Messel and Palladio detailed their buildings elegantly, but Messel did it better. That is clearly a sensitivity; some people have it.⁹

FIGURE 2.2. Riehl House, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg (1907). View from the garden, opposite and below the street. The house is an ingenious pairing of two quite different elevations, one overlooking a garden enclosed by a rampart, the other (seen here) incorporating a loggia surveying a broad slope toward Lake Griebnitz. Beginning with his earliest work, Mies strove to unify building and landscape.

FIGURE 2.3. Halle, or great room, of the Riehl House, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg (1907). The paneled walls and square tiles of the fireplace reflect Mies’s interest in and knowledge of contemporary English residential architecture.

In later interviews Mies also expressed his admiration for the Palazzo Pitti in Florence: A huge stone wall with windows cut out of it. And that is that. You see with how few means you can make architecture—and what an architecture!¹⁰