Mies van der Rohe

Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe hardly needs any in­tro­duc­tion to read­ers of this blog, or in­deed to any­one more than cas­u­ally fa­mil­i­ar with the his­tory of twen­ti­eth cen­tury ar­chi­tec­ture. Still, a few words might be in­cluded here for those who haven’t yet had the pleas­ure. He was the third dir­ect­or of the le­gendary Bauhaus art school, after the pi­on­eer­ing mod­ern­ist Wal­ter Gropi­us and the con­tro­ver­sial Marx­ist Hannes Mey­er. Des­cen­ded from stone­ma­sons, Mies entered the build­ing trade at a young age. Pri­or to his ten­ure at the Bauhaus, he was an ap­pren­tice along with Gropi­us in the stu­dio of Peter Behrens, who also later su­per­vised a Swiss prodigy by the name of Charles-Édouard Jean­ner­et (ali­as Le Cor­busier). Un­der the Ger­man mas­ter’s tu­tel­age, Mies gained an en­dur­ing ap­pre­ci­ation for the Prus­si­an clas­si­cist Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Be­sides Behrens, the oth­er mod­ern in­flu­ence on Mies dur­ing this early phase of his ca­reer was the Dutch­man Hendrik Pet­rus Ber­lage, through whom Europe learned of the ground­break­ing designs of Frank Lloyd Wright in Amer­ica.

Mies’ turn to full-fledged mod­ern­ism came in the 1920s, after he came in­to con­tact with Kurt Schwit­ters and oth­er mem­bers of the in­ter­na­tion­al av­ant-garde. Al­though his com­mis­sions earli­er in the dec­ade still came from cli­ents whose taste was rather more tra­di­tion­al, Mies nev­er­the­less began writ­ing bold art­icles and mani­fes­tos for the con­struct­iv­ist journ­al G. Oth­er con­trib­ut­ors to this peri­od­ic­al were artists and crit­ics such as El Lis­sitzky, Wern­er Gräff, and Wal­ter Ben­jamin. Jean-Louis Co­hen, au­thor of The Fu­ture of Ar­chi­tec­ture (2012), de­tails the vari­ous ex­per­i­ments Mies con­duc­ted around this time. In 1926, he was se­lec­ted to design the monu­ment to Rosa Lux­em­burg and Karl Lieb­knecht in Ber­lin. Fol­low­ing the suc­cess of the 1927 Wießenhof ex­hib­i­tion, spear­headed by Mies, a num­ber of more dar­ing projects now opened them­selves up to him. Villa Tu­gend­hat in Brno, Czechoslov­akia and the Wolf House in Gu­bin, Po­land were only the most fam­ous of these projects. In 1929, Mies was chosen to design the Ger­man pa­vil­ion for the world’s fair in Bar­celona, which re­ceived wide­spread ac­claim. You can read more about these works in an ex­cerpt taken from Alan Colquhoun’s his­tor­ic­al sur­vey Mod­ern Ar­chi­tec­ture (2002).

In any case, just as Mies was be­gin­ning to make a name for him­self, Gropi­us asked Mies to step in and re­place Mey­er over at the Bauhaus in Des­sau. At the time, Mey­er was em­broiled in a scan­dal con­cern­ing his com­mun­ist sym­path­ies. He ex­ited, along with many of his left-wing stu­dents, to plan new cit­ies in the USSR. (Eva For­gacs has writ­ten ex­cel­lently about the polit­ics that sur­roun­ded this de­cision). With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Gropi­us’ icon­ic Des­sau build­ing was com­mand­eered by the Nazis and the school moved to Ber­lin. Mies’ choice to stay in Ger­many, and in­deed col­lab­or­ate with the fas­cist au­thor­it­ies, has been chron­icled at length by Elaine Hoch­man in her 1989 study Ar­chi­tects of For­tune. Co­hen dis­misses this book as a bit of journ­al­ist­ic sen­sa­tion­al­ism, but its charges are worth tak­ing ser­i­ously. Sibyl Mo­holy-Nagy, for her part, nev­er for­gave him for this. “When [Mies] ac­cep­ted the com­mis­sion for the Reichs­bank in Ju­ly 1933, after the com­ing to power of Hitler, he was a trait­or to all of us and to everything we had fought for,” she wrote. In a 1965 let­ter, she fur­ther re­but­ted the his­tor­i­an Henry-Rus­sell Hitch­cock:

Mies van der Rohe seemed to be wholly a part of that slow death when he fi­nally ar­rived in this coun­try in 1937. His first scheme for the cam­pus of the Illinois In­sti­tute of Tech­no­logy is pain­fully re­min­is­cent of his deadly fas­cist designs for the Ger­man Reichs­bank, and the Krefeld Fact­ory of 1937 proved the old Ger­man pro­verb that he who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas. Yet he was the only one of the di­a­spora ar­chi­tects cap­able of start­ing a new life as a cre­at­ive de­sign­er fol­low­ing World War II, be­cause to him tech­no­logy was not a ro­mantic catch­word, as it had been for the Bauhaus pro­gram, but a work­able tool and an in­es­cap­able truth.

Per­son­ally, I am in­clined to agree with the judg­ment of Man­fredo Tafuri and his co-au­thor Francesco Dal Co. Mies was for the most part apolit­ic­al; i.e., “not con­nec­ted with any polit­ic­al ideo­logy.” Either way, as Mo­holy-Nagy her­self noted, he en­joyed great fame and prestige throughout the post­war peri­od, in which he con­sol­id­ated the form­al prin­ciples of the in­ter­na­tion­al style of the twen­ties and thirties, des­pite his op­pos­i­tion dur­ing those dec­ades to form­al­ism or “prob­lems of form.” However, Tafuri was right to deny this ap­par­ent vari­ance: “There is noth­ing more er­ro­neous than the in­ter­pret­a­tion of Mies van der Rohe in his late works as con­tra­dict­ing the Mies of the 1920s, or the read­ing of his late designs as re­nun­ci­at­ory in­cur­sions in­to the un­ruffled realm of the neoaca­dem­ic.” In many ways, it was only dur­ing this later phase of his ca­reer that Mies was able to real­ize the pro­gram­mat­ic vis­ion he laid out between 1921 and 1923. One need only take a look at the apart­ments he de­signed in Chica­go or Lake Point Tower, posthum­ously real­ized by his pu­pils John Hein­rich and George Schip­por­eit, to see the em­bod­i­ment of the spec­u­lat­ive of­fice build­ing and the sky­scraper he en­vi­sioned back in the 1920s. Really, it is a shame that Mies’ sig­na­ture style has lent it­self so eas­ily to im­it­a­tion, be­cause the fea­tures which seem rep­lic­able con­ceal the subtler secret of their pro­por­tions.

At any rate, you can down­load a num­ber of texts which deal with the work of Mies van der Rohe be­low. Fol­low­ing these there are a num­ber of im­ages, sketches and de­lin­eations of vari­ous proven­ance (most come from MoMA’s col­lec­tion), as well as pho­to­graphs of both Mies and build­ings which were real­ized. Texts on Mies writ­ten by Co­hen, Colquhoun, and Tafuri/Dal Co fin­ish these off.

• Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (1985/2012)
• Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art (1991)
• Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (1989)
• George Dodds, Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)
• Detlef Mertins, “Mies’ Event Space” (2005)
• Dietrich Neumann, “Three Early Designs by Mies van der Rohe” (1992)
• Gevork Hartoonian, “Mies van der Rohe: The Genealogy of Column and Wall” (1989)
• Gevork Hartoonian, “Mies: The Window Framed” (2008)
• Thomas de Monchaux, “Mies Reconsidered: A Review of Detlef Mertins’ Mies” (2014)
• Carsten Krohn, Mies van der Rohe: The Built Work (2014)

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Early the­or­et­ic­al projects

Jean-Louis Cohen
Architecture since 1890
(New York, NY: 2012)
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Van Does­burg forged a close con­nec­tion between the Neth­er­lands and Ger­many not only through his pres­ence on the door­step of the Bauhaus but also through his par­ti­cip­a­tion in the Con­gress of Re­volu­tion­ary Artists held in Düsseldorf in 1922. There he foun­ded a short-lived “Con­struct­iv­ist In­ter­na­tion­al” to­geth­er with Hans Richter and El Lis­sitzky. In Ju­ly 1923 Richter, Lis­sitzky, and Wern­er Gräff, who had at­ten­ded Van Does­burg’s lec­tures at the Bauhaus, pub­lished the first is­sue of the journ­al G, sub­titled Ma­ter­i­al zur ele­ment­are Gestal­tung [Ma­ter­i­als for Ele­ment­al Form Cre­ation]. Its pro­gram was to dis­sem­in­ate im­ages of the tech­no­lo­gic­al world and to pro­pose an ar­chi­tec­ture based on the Sach­lich­keit, or ob­jectiv­ity, of con­struc­tion sys­tems. Van Does­burg pub­lished his own mani­festo “Zur ele­ment­ar­en Gestal­tung” [On Ele­ment­al Form Cre­ation] in G. One of the prin­cip­al sup­port­ers of and con­trib­ut­ors to G was Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, who pub­lished his the­or­et­ic­al project for a Con­crete Of­fice Build­ing in the same is­sue that car­ried Van Does­burg’s mani­festo. It was ac­com­pan­ied by his own mani­festo “Bürohaus” [Of­fice Block], a first ex­pres­sion of his the­or­et­ic­al po­s­i­tions, in which he de­clared that “Ar­chi­tec­ture is the spa­tially ap­pre­hen­ded will of the epoch,” draw­ing on the ideas of Ber­lage, the pre­curs­or he most ad­mired, and Behrens, who had con­sidered ar­chi­tec­ture the “rhythmic in­cor­por­a­tion of the spir­it of the time.” A few months later, Van Does­burg in­vited Mies to par­ti­cip­ate in the De Stijl ex­hib­i­tion at the Galer­ie de l’Ef­fort mo­d­erne.

Be­gin­ning in 1921, Mies con­ceived sev­er­al icon­o­clast­ic projects. In a com­pet­i­tion entry for a Glass Of­fice Build­ing on the Fried­rich­stra­ße in Ber­lin, he sub­mit­ted a design for a glass prism with a tri­an­gu­lar plan. The an­gu­lar volume con­sisted en­tirely of a cur­tain wall, without base or cor­nice, which ap­peared to ex­tend the glaz­ing of the nearby train sta­tion over the en­tirety of its 80-meter (260-foot) struc­ture. A rad­ic­al re­sponse to New York’s Flatiron Build­ing — which the Ber­lin Da­daists had il­lus­trated in their journ­al — Mies’ project seemed to ma­ter­i­al­ize Al­fred Stieglitz’s pho­tos of Man­hat­tan con­struc­tion sites. Ac­cess to the up­per floors was provided by a cent­ral el­ev­at­or core, while nar­row canyons lined with glass al­lowed light to pen­et­rate to the in­teri­or of the site. The trans­par­ent façades re­veal­ing stacks of of­fices called to mind a bee­hive — a meta­phor­ic­al term Mies used to identi­fy the build­ing in the com­pet­i­tion. In 1922 he elab­or­ated a second ver­sion of the project in which the an­gu­lar facades gave way to a more flu­id and sinu­ous out­line, praised by crit­ics for its “Goth­ic power.”

After his Con­crete Of­fice project, which was an ab­stract in­ter­pret­a­tion of the palazzo block that Peter Behrens had built earli­er for Man­nes­mann, Mies con­ceived a con­crete “Coun­try House” (1923), about which he would de­clare, “We know no forms, only prob­lems of con­struc­tion.” The house ex­ten­ded ho­ri­zont­ally across the site and re­flec­ted Mies’ aware­ness of Wright’s houses. His Brick Coun­try House, de­signed the same year, was more pro­voc­at­ive. An as­semblage of brick ele­ments, the house con­sisted of or­tho­gon­al volumes joined in a free-flow­ing con­tinuum. For Mies, this “series of spa­tial ef­fects” was the res­ult of “the wall [los­ing] its en­clos­ing char­ac­ter and [serving] only to ar­tic­u­late the house or­gan­ism.”

Up to this point, Mies’ only real com­mis­sions were for bour­geois houses, for which he em­ployed a tra­di­tion­al­ist lan­guage. He was able to im­pose more rad­ic­al views upon his cli­ents only after 1925. Ini­tially, he used brick in an aes­thet­ic, ex­press­ive way, as in the Wolf House in Guben and es­pe­cially in the Monu­ment to Karl Lieb­knecht and Rosa Lux­em­burg (1926) in Ber­lin, a sculp­tur­al in­ter­pret­a­tion of a wall evok­ing the ex­e­cu­tion of the two Sparta­cist lead­ers. Be­gin­ning with his houses for the tex­tile in­dus­tri­al­ists Her­mann Lange (1928–1929) and Josef Es­ters (1928) in Krefeld, his use of brick ceased to be load bear­ing. These two op­u­lent homes, whose facades brought to mind the factor­ies of the neigh­bor­ing Ruhr re­gion, had steel struc­tures, which made it pos­sible to su­per­im­pose very dif­fer­ent floor plans on two dif­fer­ent levels: large rooms to dis­play the own­ers’ col­lec­tions on the ground floor, bed­rooms above.

Mies soon ap­plied him­self to a more rad­ic­al an­ni­hil­a­tion of tra­di­tion­al do­mest­ic space. The first build­ing to un­der­go such treat­ment, the Ger­many Pa­vil­ion at the 1929 Bar­celona In­ter­na­tion­al Ex­pos­i­tion, did not have much of a pro­gram bey­ond its ce­re­mo­ni­al pur­pose. The lat­ent fluid­ity of his Brick Coun­try House began to be palp­able in this se­quence of open rooms rest­ing on a po­di­um and evok­ing the garden struc­tures of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, which Mies ad­mired. Its stone and glass par­ti­tions defined a free-flow­ing space and were clearly dis­tinct from the load-bear­ing steel frame — des­pite a few in­vis­ible com­prom­ises. The dom­in­ant ele­ment was a wall of golden onyx, in­ten­ded as a back­drop for the king of Spain’s re­cep­tion by Ger­man of­fi­cials. In this space — un­reg­u­lated by any axi­al sys­tem, open to di­ag­on­al views, and de­signed to ac­com­mod­ate vis­it­ors’ move­ments — the only per­cept­ible sym­metry was the ho­ri­zont­al one between floor and ceil­ing, mak­ing the ver­tic­al space of the pa­vil­ion prac­tic­ally re­vers­ible.

The prom­ise of a new type of do­mest­ic space first glimpsed in Bar­celona was brought to fruition in the house of Fritz and Grete Tu­gend­hat (1928-1930) in Brno, Czechoslov­akia. Perched on a hill over­look­ing the city, the house re­pro­duced the flu­id floor plan of the Bar­celona Pa­vil­ion, but this time areas had well-defined pur­poses, as if the par­ti­tions between rooms had been erased once the plan was com­pleted. Ac­cord­ing to the crit­ic Paul West­heim, Mies con­ceived the house as “a cir­cu­la­tion route lead­ing from room to room ac­cord­ing to [the own­ers’] style of liv­ing.”

West­heim con­tin­ued: “[T]he home must be con­sidered en­tirely as a kind of busi­ness that, like any oth­er busi­ness, is based on the prin­ciple of an ar­tic­u­la­tion of vari­ous func­tions. No room should be isol­ated and cut off from the oth­ers. Even more, con­tinu­ity between the rooms is to be pur­sued. The en­tire space is to be ar­ranged or­gan­ic­ally, ac­cord­ing to its en­vis­aged uses.” As at Bar­celona, the liv­ing room, which over­looked the city, was backed with an onyx wall. The din­ing room was defined by a cyl­indric­al par­ti­tion of rose­wood. In 1930, thanks to his very pub­lic suc­cess in Bar­celona, Mies was named dir­ect­or of the Bauhaus in Des­sau, where he would rad­ic­ally change the ped­agogy of ar­chi­tec­ture.

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Between the wars
The spir­itu­al­iz­a­tion of tech­nique

Alan Colquhoun
Modern Architecture
(New York: 2002)
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Al­though no one ar­chi­tect in the Ger­many of the 1920s dom­in­ated the pro­fes­sion­al scene as Le Cor­busier did in France, the repu­ta­tion of Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) in the sphere of aes­thet­ics seems to have been equal to that of Gropi­us in the sphere of or­gan­iz­a­tion. A man of few, if weighty, words, Mies was not only an as­tute self-pub­li­cist, but an ar­chi­tect with the abil­ity to re­duce every prob­lem to a kind of es­sen­tial sim­pli­city — a sim­pli­city that con­tin­ues to give rise to con­flict­ing in­ter­pret­a­tions of his work to this day.

In Mies’ work, two op­pos­ing tend­en­cies struggled for dom­in­ance. One could be de­scribed as the en­clos­ure of func­tion in a gen­er­al­ized cu­bic con­tain­er not com­mit­ted to any par­tic­u­lar set of con­crete func­tions — a tend­ency partly de­rived from his early al­le­gi­ance to neo­clas­si­cism. The oth­er was the ar­tic­u­la­tion of the build­ing in re­sponse to the fluid­ity of life. This second tend­ency, however, sel­dom in­volved him in fig­ur­al shap­ing, as it did the Ex­pres­sion­ists, nor did it align Mies with what Behne called “func­tion­al­ism.” Fol­low­ing a con­struct­iv­ist or neo­plas­ti­cist lo­gic, neut­ral forms could cre­ate sys­tems flex­ible enough to re­spond to any ima­gin­able life situ­ation, every build­ing tak­ing on a unique con­fig­ur­a­tion while be­ing made from sim­il­ar ele­ments. It was such a pro­cess that Mies ad­op­ted when he aban­doned the house as a single pa­vil­ion and broke it up in­to its ba­sic ele­ments. I will dis­cuss here the houses Mies pro­duced between the wars, in which he at­temp­ted to re­con­cile these con­flict­ing ideas — neo­clas­sic­al ob­jec­ti­fic­a­tion on the one hand and Neo­plas­ti­cist frag­ment­a­tion on the oth­er.

Mies’ ar­chi­tec­tur­al form­a­tion was re­mark­ably sim­il­ar to Le Cor­busier’s, though their re­sponse to the con­di­tions of mod­ern­ity that they both re­cog­nized could hardly have been more dif­fer­ent. Both had been trained in craft schools and had climbed in­to the pro­fes­sion­ally and so­cially high­er sphere of ar­chi­tec­ture and the “fine arts”; both changed their names; both worked their way through a form­at­ive peri­od of neo­clas­si­cism (in the design of fur­niture as well as that of houses) based on the ex­ample of the same two mas­ters — Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens; in both cases, their Mod­ern­ist work fol­lowed on without in­ter­rup­tion from their neo­clas­sic­al work and was strongly in­flu­enced by it. But, where­as Le Cor­busier de­signed only two neo­clas­sic­al houses be­fore mov­ing on to oth­er ex­plor­a­tions (though he con­tin­ued to design Em­pire style in­teri­ors for sev­er­al years), Mies’ “Bie­der­mei­er” peri­od las­ted from 1907 to 1926 and was the basis of a suc­cess­ful ar­chi­tec­tur­al prac­tice. He was over 40 when he com­pleted his first mod­ern­ist-con­struct­iv­ist build­ing, the Wolf House in Guben (1925–1927).

All Mies’ neo­clas­sic­al houses are sym­met­ric­al two-storey prisms, some­times with minor ap­pend­ages. These houses, es­pe­cially the Riehl House (1907) [116], bor­rowed heav­ily from the il­lus­tra­tions of eight­eenth-cen­tury ver­nacu­lar–clas­sic­al houses in Paul Mebes’ book Um 1800 of 1905. The Riehl House dif­fers from the oth­ers in its sit­ing. Like Le Cor­busier’s Mais­on Jean­ner­et and Favre-Jac­ot at La Chaux-de-Fonds (and like Gi­ulio Ro­mano’s Villa Lante on the Gi­an­nicolo in Rome which might have in­flu­enced both Le Cor­busier and Mies) it is sited on a steep in­cline. One of its gable ends is front­al­ized by means of a log­gia and plunges un­ex­pec­tedly down to con­nect with a long re­tain­ing wall. This might be called the build­ing-as-dam type, and is a vari­ant of the Stadtk­rone, tend­ing to be shown tower­ing above the view­er, in the Wag­n­er­schule man­ner. It is also found in oth­er projects by Mies: the com­pet­i­tion scheme for the Bis­mar­ck Monu­ment of 1910 (which prob­ably had its ori­gin in Schinkel’s Schloss Ori­anda project of 1838), the Wolf House, the Tu­gend­hat House (1928-1930), and the Moun­tain House project of 1934.

When he re­sumed his prac­tice in Ber­lin after the First World War, Mies met the ex­per­i­ment­al film­maker and Da­daist Hans Richter and joined his circle of artists and writers, which in­cluded van Does­burg and El Lis­sitzky. Mies’ con­ver­sion from mi­met­ic ec­lecticism to Con­struct­iv­ist ab­strac­tion dates from this first en­counter with the Ber­lin av­ant-garde. In 1922, Richter, El Lis­sitzky, and the artist and film­maker Wern­er Gräff foun­ded the journ­al G: Ma­ter­i­al zur Ele­ment­ar­en Gestal­tung [G: From Ma­ter­i­al to Form]. It was here that Mies pub­lished his earli­est Con­struct­iv­ist projects to­geth­er with brief po­lem­ic­al art­icles in which he took a strongly anti-form­al­ist po­s­i­tion: “We know no forms, only build­ing prob­lems. Form is not the goal but the res­ult of our work.”

These early Con­struct­iv­ist projects in which Mies ex­plored some of the fun­da­ment­al prob­lems posed by new tech­niques and ma­ter­i­als, com­prise two Scheerbar­tian glass sky­scrapers (1921-1922), an eight-storey of­fice block in re­in­forced con­crete (1922), and two single-storey houses — a Con­crete Coun­try House (1923) and a Brick Coun­try House (1924). The houses in this group, to­geth­er with the little-known Less­ing House project (1923), sum­mar­ize the dia­lectic in Mies’ work. In the Con­crete Coun­try House the cube is dis­solved in­to a spread-eagled, swastika-like form; in the Less­ing House the cube is broken up in­to smal­ler cubes, in­ter­lock­ing with each oth­er in ech­el­on; in the Brick Coun­try House the cubes are re­placed by a sys­tem of planes. This pro­gress­ive frag­ment­a­tion and ar­tic­u­la­tion, in which the ex­tern­al form of the house re­flects its in­tern­al sub­di­vi­sion, be­trays the in­dir­ect in­flu­ence of the Eng­lish free­style house, Ber­lage, and Wright, but its im­me­di­ate an­cest­or is De Stijl.

The Wolf House, and the Lange and Es­ters houses, both built in Krefeld in 1927, ex­plore the Less­ing type. Built of the loc­al build­ing ma­ter­i­al, brick, they are broken up in­to in­ter­lock­ing cubes to form roughly pyr­am­id­al com­pos­i­tions of two and three storeys. The prin­cip­al rooms on the ground floor are opened up to each oth­er to form se­quences in ech­el­on. The bed­room floors are set back to provide roof ter­races.

The Tu­gend­hat House at Brno in the Czech Re­pub­lic marks a new stage in Mies’ de­vel­op­ment. No longer in brick, it is rendered and painted white. Its or­gan­iz­a­tion res­ults from a site con­di­tion that re­calls that of the Riehl House. Built against a steep slope, the house con­sists of a mono­lith­ic cu­bic mass with a set-back, frag­men­ted up­per floor, through which one enters from the street to des­cend to the liv­ing room on the floor be­low. The liv­ing room is an enorm­ous space di­vided by fixed but freest­and­ing screens. The mono­lith­ic volume of the house is wedged solidly in­to the slop­ing ground. The south and east sides of the liv­ing area are fully glazed with floor-to-ceil­ing, mech­an­ic­ally re­tract­able, plate-glass win­dows, open­ing to a pan­or­amic view. Thus, the in­flec­ted space, which in the Brick Coun­try House ex­tends out to in­fin­ity, is here con­tained with­in a cu­bic volume. But at the same time, this volume is made totally trans­par­ent. Clas­sic­al clos­ure and the in­fin­ite sub­lime are com­bined by means of mod­ern tech­no­logy.

Con­tem­por­an­eous with the Tu­gend­hat House is the Ger­man Pa­vil­ion for the Bar­celona In­ter­na­tion­al Ex­pos­i­tion of 1929, known as the Bar­celona Pa­vil­ion. Here, the en­clos­ing cube is dis­pensed with and the en­tire space is defined in terms of in­de­pend­ent ho­ri­zont­al and ver­tic­al planes. But in­stead of dis­ap­pear­ing in­to in­fin­ity, the wall planes turn back on them­selves to form open courts which clamp the build­ing to the two ends of the site. Sited astride one of the ex­hib­i­tion routes, the pa­vil­ion was not so much a dam as a fil­ter.

In both the Tu­gend­hat House and the Bar­celona Pa­vil­ion, in con­trast to the Brick Coun­try House, the roof is sup­por­ted by an in­de­pend­ent grid of columns. At first sight this looks like an oddly be­lated dis­cov­ery of the prin­ciple of the free plan. But at second glance the columns seem too slender to carry the roof without some help from the wall planes (their slen­der­ness is en­hanced by their re­flect­ive fin­ish). Rather than columns they seem more like signs mark­ing the mod­u­lar grid.

Wolf house

Krefeld houses

Villa Tugendhat

Barcelona pavilion

Barcelona pavilion covered in Die Form

Between 1931 and 1935, Mies de­signed a series of houses which ad­ap­ted the Bar­celona Pa­vil­ion plan-type to do­mest­ic use. The first was a mod­el house in the 1931 Ber­lin Build­ing Ex­pos­i­tion. This was fol­lowed by a series of un­built projects, in­clud­ing the Ul­rich Lange House (1935), for single-storey houses with­in closed courts. These designs be­come more and more in­tro­ver­ted. In one sense they can be seen to be fol­low­ing the same Medi­ter­ranean pro­to­types as oth­er av­ant-garde ar­chi­tects of the 1930s — in this re­spect Le Cor­busier’s en­closed garden at Poissy makes an in­ter­est­ing com­par­is­on. But they also sug­gest that Mies (or his cli­ents) might have been with­draw­ing in­to a private world, un­con­sciously re­act­ing to a threat­en­ing polit­ic­al situ­ation. In spite of this tend­ency to­wards en­clos­ure, however, the more elab­or­ate projects of this peri­od, such as the Hubbe House, were left par­tially open to give framed views of nature. In­deed, the nat­ur­al land­scape is om­ni­present in Mies’ sketches at this time, sug­gest­ing that the main func­tion of the house had be­come that of fram­ing a view in which nature is ideal­ized. Mies later ac­know­ledged this dis­tan­cing ef­fect: “When you see nature through the glass walls of the Farns­worth House it gets a deep­er mean­ing than from out­side. More is asked from nature be­cause it be­comes part of a great­er whole.”

Ac­cord­ing to a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion, Mies’ min­im­al­ist dis­til­la­tion of ar­chi­tec­ture was the res­ult of a deep en­gage­ment with the craft of build­ing. Cer­tainly, Mies was ob­sessed by cer­tain craft-like as­pects of ar­chi­tec­ture, but he was more con­cerned with ideal­iz­ing and me­di­at­ing tech­niques of graph­ic rep­res­ent­a­tion than with con­struc­tion. As is clear from his writ­ings, Mies real­ized that the tra­di­tion­al re­la­tion­ship between the crafts­man and his product had been des­troyed by the ma­chine. His cri­ter­ia were ideal and visu­al, not con­struc­tion­al — not even “visu­al–con­struc­tion­al.” It is true that un­like, for in­stance, Le Cor­busier, Mies dis­plays the ma­ter­i­al­ity of his build­ing ele­ments, but he as­sembles these ele­ments like mont­ages; their con­nec­tions are nev­er vis­ible. Even more than that of the oth­er mod­ern­ists, Mies’ work runs counter to the “tec­ton­ic” tra­di­tion.

Re­cently, in a jus­ti­fied re­ac­tion against the myth of Mies-the-con­struct­or, crit­ics have in­ven­ted a post­mod­ern Mies — one who primar­ily op­er­ated with sur­faces and ef­fects, with­in the end­less play of the sig­ni­fi­er. But this in­ter­pret­a­tion errs in the op­pos­ite dir­ec­tion. It ig­nores Mies’ fear of post-Ni­et­z­schean chaos and it also as­sumes that an aes­thet­ic of ma­ter­i­als and their eph­em­er­al ap­pear­ance (as sig­ni­fied by the Ger­man word Schein) is in­com­pat­ible with a be­lief in found­a­tion­al val­ues. Mies’ con­cep­tion of ar­chi­tec­ture fol­lowed the dia­lect­ic­al tend­ency of Ger­man Ideal­ism to think in terms of op­pos­ites.

Ac­cord­ing to the Neo­pla­ton­ic aes­thet­ics that in­flu­enced his think­ing, the tran­scend­ent­al world is re­flec­ted in the world of the senses (Mies was fond of quot­ing St Au­gustine’s dictum: “Beauty is the ra­di­ance of truth”). When mod­i­fied by the concept of the “will of the epoch,” this be­came the basis of his be­lief that the spir­itu­al could only be­come act­ive in the world in a his­tor­icized form, that is to say in the form of tech­no­logy. Such prob­lems of sur­face and depth, the con­tin­gent and the ideal, also lay be­hind the anti-form­al­ism of Mies’ art­icles in G in 1923. These did not rep­res­ent a “ma­ter­i­al­ist” phase (later to be ab­jured) as most com­ment­at­ors claim; they re­flec­ted a topos of mod­ern­ist aes­thet­ics de­rived from Ger­man Ro­man­ti­cism, ac­cord­ing to which the forms of art should, like those of nature, re­veal an in­ner es­sence and not be im­posed from the out­side.To in­quire in­to Mies’ philo­soph­ic­al back­ground is, of course, in no way to sug­gest that his ar­chi­tec­ture was an “ex­pres­sion” of philo­soph­ic­al ideas. For Mies, it was pre­cisely the auto-ref­er­en­ti­al­ity of the work of ar­chi­tec­ture that gave it ac­cess to the world of spir­itu­al mean­ing. Mies’ mod­ern­ism and his ideal­ism were per­fectly com­pat­ible.

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Postwar projects

Manfredo Tafuri and
Francesco Dal Co
A History of Modern
Architecture (1979)
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The ca­reer of Mies van der Rohe was of a dif­fer­ent his­tor­ic­al im­port­ance from those of Per­ret, Gropi­us, and Mendel­sohn. The very fact that he did not flee Nazi Ger­many un­til 1937 gives cause for re­flec­tion. Nor is it ir­rel­ev­ant that Philip John­son, his fu­ture col­lab­or­at­or, was at the time sup­port­ing a pro-Nazi polit­ic­al line and in an art­icle pub­lished in 1933 poin­ted to Mies as a po­ten­tial lead­ing fig­ure in the ar­chi­tec­ture of the Third Reich. Let there be no un­cer­tainty: the per­son­al ideo­logy of Mies was not con­nec­ted with any polit­ic­al ideo­logy. For Mies the world is what it is; it is not giv­en to us to change it in its struc­tures. The Zeit­geist is a cat­egor­ic­al im­per­at­ive, and each and every par­tic­u­lar mani­fest­a­tion of it is, in the long run, equi­val­ent to every oth­er. “The ex­i­gency of our time of real­ism and func­tion­al­ism must be sat­is­fied,” he had writ­ten in 1924, af­firm­ing however the “grandeur” of the im­per­at­ive that leads to an­onym­ity. Ex­actly that an­om­al­ous col­loc­a­tion with­in mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture made it pos­sible for Mies to real­ize him­self in the United States with the same su­preme in­dif­fer­ence that had guided his at­ti­tude be­fore then.

Yet in his cel­eb­rated first speech at the Illinois In­sti­tute of Tech­no­logy in 1938, he de­clared in reply to the lac­on­ic in­tro­duc­tion made by Wright: “Thus true edu­ca­tion is con­cerned not only with prac­tic­al goals but also with val­ues. By our prac­tic­al aims we are bound to the spe­cif­ic struc­ture of our epoch. Our val­ues, on the oth­er hand, are rooted in the spir­itu­al nature of men. Our prac­tic­al aims meas­ure only our ma­ter­i­al pro­gress. The val­ues we pro­fess re­veal the level of our cul­ture. Dif­fer­ent as prac­tic­al aims and val­ues are, they are nev­er­the­less closely con­nec­ted. For to what else should they be re­lated if not to our aims in life?” Those ap­par­ently con­ven­tion­al words seem to con­tra­dict his own fam­ous dis­tinc­tion between the “what” and the “why.” Their hid­den side, like that of the en­tire per­son­al­ity of Mies, can only be com­pre­hen­ded by link­ing the res­ults of his European ef­forts with the works he cre­ated in his new home.

Im­me­di­ately after hav­ing as­sumed the dir­ec­tion of the ar­chi­tec­tur­al sec­tion of the Illinois In­sti­tute of Tech­no­logy (then the Ar­mor In­sti­tute) Mies was asked to design the new cam­pus of the uni­versity. His first ideas date from 1939, and work was be­gun in 1942. The cam­pus is situ­ated in a chaot­ic slum area close to the cen­ter of Chica­go. Mies im­me­di­ately posed the prob­lem of how to ac­cen­tu­ate even more the isol­a­tion of the vast rect­angle of the cam­pus, while main­tain­ing an ax­is of sym­metry for the build­ings that would define the cent­ral open area but at the same time pro­gress­ively lib­er­ate those to­ward the peri­phery from the geo­met­ric­al im­per­at­ive thus cre­ated. This ba­sic idea was main­tained in suc­cess­ive plans, al­though Mies had to give up his goal of a cam­pus en­tirely without streets. As the unit of con­trol he es­tab­lished a single mod­ule of 24 × 24 feet with a height of 12 feet. This is clearly seen in the brick­work of cer­tain walls and in the glass pan­els framed by the ex­posed steel struc­ture and is im­pli­cit in the pla­ni­met­ric prin­ciple gov­ern­ing the en­tire com­plex. Only in the lib­rary and the ad­min­is­tra­tion build­ing was the mod­ule ex­pan­ded to meas­ure 64 × 64 × 30 feet. In this way he en­sured that this purely ideal unit would be ap­plied in all sub­sequent build­ings, wheth­er real­ized by Holabird & Root, by Skid­more, Ow­ings & Mer­rill, or by him­self in col­lab­or­a­tion with oth­er firms. With that es­tab­lished, all his at­ten­tion could be con­cen­trated on the de­tails of the blocks he him­self was to real­ize, keep­ing as a fixed prin­ciple the iden­ti­fic­a­tion of the total form of the build­ings with the na­ked geo­met­ric­al schema. With ref­er­ence to the labor­at­ory for min­er­alo­gic­al and me­tal­lur­gic­al re­search and to the Alumni Me­mori­al, John­son could speak of a philo­sophy of the bei­nahe nichts, the “al­most noth­ing,” which brings to mind such her­met­ic aph­or­isms of Mies as “less is more” and “the Good Lord is in the de­tails.” It would be mis­lead­ing to in­ter­pret this as con­cen­tra­tion on the pur­ity of the tech­no­lo­gic­al factor or, even worse, to speak in gen­er­al­ized terms of a “new clas­si­cism.”

Seagram Building

For the In­sti­tute com­plex Mies cre­ated one set of his mas­ter­pieces in 1952-1956, Crown Hall, the ar­chi­tec­ture school. It is a pure prism set on a rect­an­gu­lar ground plan with its roof and at­tic sus­pen­ded from four par­al­lel steel frames so as to ob­tain a totally un­en­cumbered in­teri­or space. Here were com­bined two themes, both tried first in works very dif­fer­ent from this and from each oth­er: the house for Dr. Edith Farns­worth in Pi­ano, Illinois, built in 1950, and the projects for the so-called Fifty-Fifty House of 1951 and for the Na­tion­al Theat­er in Man­nheim, Ger­many, in 1953. Those three designs, like Crown Hall, end up as mere geo­met­ric ob­jects lif­ted off the ground and en­clos­ing ab­so­lutely free in­teri­or spaces. For all three the prin­ciple of sus­pen­ded roofs and at­tics is linked to struc­tur­al in­ven­tions. The glass of the walls of the Farns­worth house is in­ter­rup­ted only by eight painted-white steel piers that raise its volume above the ground and render meta­phys­ic­al its con­tact with the rich nat­ur­al wooded site. But the per­fectly square Fifty-Fifty House is sus­pen­ded by four sup­ports that have been placed in the middle of the sides in such a way as to seem­ingly elim­in­ate any ma­ter­i­al­ity from its mass. The design Mies pro­posed for the Man­nheim theat­er, like Crown Hall or the more com­plex project of 1954 for a con­ven­tion hall in Chica­go, fea­tured a single vast space in which the vari­ous in­tern­al func­tions would not de­tract from the ab­so­lute­ness of the en­clos­ing volume. Much has been writ­ten that seeks to de­cipher the sig­ni­fic­ance of such im­plac­able pur­ism, tak­ing sides for or against the flex­ib­il­ity or — de­pend­ing on the crit­ic — the con­stric­tion of the “free” spaces de­signed by Mies.

Per­haps we can trace its ori­gins. “Less is more”: be­hind the re­duc­tion to min­im­al­ist signs is the quest for value. God is re­sus­cit­ated from the Ni­et­z­schean ashes, even if hid­den in the min­im­um ele­ment, the de­tail. The re­duc­tion to the sign is, in any event, faith­ful to the doc­trine of the ele­ment­ar­ist av­ant-garde. In all of the build­ings by Mies we have men­tioned so far these “signs” are ob­vi­ous: for ex­ample, the sus­pen­sion of the at­tic above the ground and the clear dis­tinc­tion between struc­tures and volumes. In these re­spects Mies was still with­in the trend ex­pressed by the re­view G, the ab­stract films of Hans Richter, and his own Bar­celona Pa­vil­ion. But the val­ues — the what — are not to be con­fused with the facts, the how. In this Mies re­mained per­fectly faith­ful to the Wit­tgen­stein of the Tractatus Lo­gi­co-philo­sophi­cus even if, like Wit­tgen­stein him­self, he found him­self con­strained, in or­der to jus­ti­fy the autonom­ous uni­verse of the laws of lo­gic, to ad­mit a mys­tic­al pre­sup­pos­i­tion that is con­nec­ted with those laws in prob­lem­at­ic man­ner. The “facts” pos­sess the lan­guage of ex­ist­ence. The lan­guage of the signs must not be con­fused with them lest it be­tray both the “facts” and the “val­ues.” To quote Karl Kraus: “Since the facts have the floor, let any­one who has any­thing to say come for­ward and keep his mouth shut.” Si­lence is, there­fore, a “sym­bol­ic form” in a sense all its own, and be­cause of this the link of Mies with De Stijl is no more than ap­par­ent. Moreover, his Amer­ic­an works go bey­ond the simple strip­ping bare of the void, as in the signs that defined the Bar­celona Pa­vil­ion. Even if only “ex­posed,” the signs take on body again, but they no longer ar­tic­u­late them­selves. In this, Mies was the most re­morse­less crit­ic of Mo­holy-Nagy and Lis­sitzky. If all the in­cor­por­ated value is in the “will” to make the sign re­main sign, to speak only of the re­nun­ci­ation that makes it pos­sible to dom­in­ate the des­tiny im­posed by the Zeit­geist by in­ter­ject­ing it as “duty,” then ar­tic­u­lat­ing the signs — at­tempt­ing to make them “speak” — can only lead to be­tray­ing the value, re­du­cing the lan­guage of signs to in­stru­ment of pub­li­city. This is what Mo­holy-Nagy and Lis­sitzky were forced to do, not hav­ing wished — by force of their own pro­gram­mat­ic in­tent — to go all the way in ac­cept­ing the sep­ar­a­tion between the lan­guage of forms and the lan­guage of ex­ist­ence. Mies, however, did go the full way in that dis­tinc­tion. His spaces, in that sense, are not “ac­cess­ible,” do not speak of the “free­dom” that they seem­ingly prom­ise. On the con­trary, Crown Hall and the Fifty-Fifty House as­sume in them­selves the in­eluct­ab­il­ity of ab­sence that the con­tem­por­ary world im­poses on the lan­guage of form. But this does not sig­ni­fy “re­nun­ci­ation of form.”

Mies de­clared that the task of art is to im­pose or­der on the ex­ist­ing chaos. His IIT cam­pus is an oas­is of or­der ir­re­pro­du­cible with­in the met­ro­pol­it­an chaos. The in­flex­ib­il­ity of its geo­met­ric­al laws demon­strates that if “or­der is chaos,” then form in­tro­duces it­self in­to it as a mute and un­as­sail­able mir­ror of that chaos. With this one can also ex­plain the so-called clas­si­cism of Mies, his “re­turn to Schinkel.” The es­sence of the clas­sic­al, Olympi­an peace, is not to­tal­ity achieved; quite the op­pos­ite, it is pre­cisely con­scious re­nun­ci­ation of the vi­tal flux of change — of the Eros — in or­der to dom­in­ate it in­tel­lec­tu­ally. Be­hind the ex­posed con­crete web of the Promon­tory Apart­ments of 1949 in Chica­go or the steel skel­et­ons form­ing the frame­work for the uni­form glassed walls of the two Chica­go res­id­en­tial sky­scrapers — the Lake Shore Drive Apart­ments of 1951 and the Com­mon­wealth Prom­en­ade Apart­ments of two years later — lives just such a re­turn to the spir­it of Goethe’s Wei­mar. No longer is there a plur­al­ity of signs but the en­tire edi­fice ap­pears as neut­ral sign. The will to dom­in­ate chaos is en­tirely con­tained in the in­tel­lec­tu­al act that takes its dis­tance from the real so as to af­firm its own pres­ence. In the in­teri­or of chaos the per­fect si­lence is dis­quiet­ing. It in­tro­duces rup­tures that are po­lem­ic­al to the ex­tent that the dis­tance which the build­ing as ar­chi­tec­ture in­ter­poses between it­self and its con­text is her­met­ic­al. In the Seagram Build­ing of 1954-1958, an of­fice sky­scraper on Park Av­en­ue in the heart of mid-Man­hat­tan, Mies re­peated on an­oth­er scale the op­er­a­tion he had car­ried through in Chica­go with the IIT cam­pus. Here again he ad­op­ted the cur­tain wall and the con­tinu­ous glass face. But the ex­posed met­al parts are in bronze, the pan­el­ing in pol­ished marble, and the heat-proof glass is brown. All this ac­cen­tu­ates the volu­met­ric unity of the prin­cip­al prism con­nec­ted with two lower par­al­lelepipeds to its rear.

Here the ab­so­lute­ness of the ob­ject is total. The max­im­um of form­al struc­tur­al­ity is matched by the max­im­um ab­sence of im­ages. That lan­guage of ab­sence is pro­jec­ted on an ul­teri­or “void” that mir­rors the first void and causes it to res­on­ate: the small plaza paved in travertine that sep­ar­ates the sky­scraper from Park Av­en­ue con­tains two sym­met­ric­al foun­tains. This is no place for re­pose or con­tem­pla­tion: Mies said that the two basins should be filled right up to their brims to pre­vent the pub­lic from sit­ting on their edges. The plaza is in­ten­ded to be the pla­ni­met­ric in­ver­sion of the sig­ni­fic­ance of the sky­scraper: two voids an­swer­ing each oth­er and speak­ing the lan­guage of the nil, of the si­lence which — by a para­dox worthy of Kafka — as­saults the noise of the met­ro­pol­is.

That double “ab­sent struc­ture” stands aloof from the city in the very act of ex­pos­ing it­self to it. Re­nun­ci­ation — the clas­sic­al Entsagung — is defin­it­ive here. To ar­tic­u­late this re­nun­ci­ation Mies takes a step back­ward and re­mains si­lent. The void as sym­bol­ic form — ul­ti­mate act of the European myth of Reas­on — has been re­duced to a phantom of it­self. Vic­tory over an­guish no longer has at its dis­pos­al the “lan­guage of the soul,” as in the Kand­in­sky of the first ab­stract wa­ter­col­ors. Nor is the ho­mo­gen­eous bronze and brown-glass mass of the Seagram Build­ing in any way akin to the white-on-white square of Kasimir Malevich. Des­pite everything, the Miesian ab­sence is con­tra­dic­tion in­ter­jec­ted. The Amer­ic­an ar­chi­tects grasped this very well when they ad­op­ted the urb­an mod­el of the Seagram Build­ing — a pris­mat­ic sky­scraper with fore­court — and re­peated it in the Chase Man­hat­tan Bank Build­ing and the Uni­on Carbide Build­ing, but even more when they made use of it to get the old zon­ing law re­formed. In 1961 a new zon­ing code for New York City sanc­tioned ex­tra height for sky­scrapers set back from the street in such a way as to provide open pub­lic plazas on their lots. The res­ult was a rap­id change in the pan­or­ama of Lower Man­hat­tan and a good stretch of Sixth Av­en­ue, es­pe­cially in front of Rock­e­feller Cen­ter. At the feet of the lu­cid glass prisms of the Ex­xon Build­ing, the new Mc­Graw-Hill Build­ing, the Celanese Build­ing, little plazas [piazz­et­tas] huddle all in a line. They are ad­orned with sculp­ture and foun­tains that are quite without any real func­tion, sit­ting there in the most ab­so­lute dis­order like so many use­less out­door wait­ing rooms. What is tra­gic in the Seagram Build­ing is re­peated as a norm in these in the form of farce. The com­pact cur­tain wall de­vised by Mies like­wise proved an easy for­mula for whole­sale re­pro­duc­tion. It would be wrong to con­sider this to be con­trary to the in­ten­tions of Mies. But it would also be wrong to re­duce his in­ten­tions to just that.

The su­preme in­dif­fer­ence of the trans­planted Ger­man mas­ter made him an easy prey for spec­u­lat­ive op­er­a­tions passing them­selves off as cul­tur­al, as in the La­fay­ette Park quarter of De­troit. There Mies col­lab­or­ated with Lud­wig Hil­ber­seimer to can­cel a plan for slum clear­ance which called for a low-cost hous­ing de­vel­op­ment. That worthy project was re­placed with a tidy al­tern­a­tion of tall slabs and low blocks provid­ing res­id­en­tial ac­com­mod­a­tions in a land­scaped set­ting for mem­bers of the middle- and up­per-in­come brack­ets. But bey­ond all that, once the “lan­guage of si­lence” had been achieved, noth­ing re­mained but to re­peat it al­ways and anew. In the Neue Na­tion­algaler­ie built between 1962 and 1968 in West Ber­lin, the mu­seum it­self is un­der­ground. As in the Bar­celona Pa­vil­ion, the real ar­chi­tec­tur­al fo­cus is the empty space. In oth­er works — an ex­traordin­ary project of 1957-1958 for re­struc­tur­ing the tip of Man­hat­tan with three res­id­en­tial sky­scrapers isol­ated from the dis­orderly dregs of the hous­ing be­hind them, the Charles Cen­ter of 1964 in Bal­timore, and the Fed­er­al Court Build­ing in the Fed­er­al Cen­ter in Chica­go — Mies cal­ib­rated to the point of para­dox in­fin­ites­im­al vari­ations in­side his de­cor­tic­ated volumes which, not only meta­phor­ic­ally, con­strain chaos to re­flect it­self in them. The uni­fied sur­faces of the ex­ter­i­or of the Fed­er­al Court Build­ing uni­formly con­ceal a greatly varie­gated in­teri­or where the double-height walls of the courtrooms are dis­posed between two rib­bons of of­fices. But the per­fectly ho­mo­gen­eous, vit­reous ex­panse is also a mir­ror in the lit­er­al sense: the “al­most noth­ing” has be­come “big glass,” al­though im­prin­ted not with the her­met­ic sur­real­ist ploys of Duch­amp, but re­flect­ing im­ages of the urb­an chaos that sur­rounds the time­less Miesian pur­ity. Once again a re­turn to ori­gins.

Kurt Schwit­ters, the great friend of Mies in his Ber­lin years, threw in­to his “Merz” pic­tures all sorts of scraps and the most un­likely ob­jects, trans­form­ing his col­lages in­to “uni­verses of af­fec­tion.” While the art of Rauschen­berg and the new Amer­ic­an Dada in the fifties and six­ties warmed over the themes of the neg­at­iv­ist av­ant-garde, Mies was sit­ing his Merzbau plumb in the cen­ter of the met­ro­pol­is, a con­struc­tion that has no need to dirty it­self with the shift and flux of phe­nom­ena. It ac­cepts them, ab­sorbs them, re­stores them to them­selves in a per­verse multi-du­plic­a­tion, like a Pop Art sculp­ture that ob­liges the Amer­ic­an met­ro­pol­is to look at it­self re­flec­ted — and Mies was not one to ac­cen­tu­ate the hor­ror of the im­age thus pro­duced — in the neut­ral mir­ror that breaks the city web. In this, ar­chi­tec­ture ar­rives at the ul­ti­mate lim­its of its own pos­sib­il­it­ies. Like the last notes soun­ded by the Doc­tor Faus­tus of Thomas Mann, ali­en­a­tion, hav­ing be­come ab­so­lute, test­i­fies uniquely to its own pres­ence, sep­ar­at­ing it­self from the world to de­clare the world’s in­cur­able mal­ady.

Neue Nationalgalerie: Models and floor plans