I Gave Myself a Shock: Mies and the Pavilion

Kevin Harrington

[This lecture was presented at a symposium on Mies and the Pavilion at the Politecnico di Milano in 1997.]

I wish to thank my friends and colleagues in Milano who have been kind enough to invite me to talk about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his designs for public spaces. These spaces, or pavilions, are those buildings which are generally one story, clear span and free standing. Just as we have in mind a typical villa by Palladio, we also carry around in our heads the typical pavilion by Mies. In both cases, careful investigation displays a wide variety of forms that can express the type.

My remarks are in two parts. First I wish to state a thesis regarding Mies and his method of design. Second, I wish to explore the thesis as an intellectual and formal problem Mies chose to solve. To illustrate these ideas I will describe a series of projects to support my thesis and demonstrate Mies's ideas in practice. I will argue that projects of the early 1940's, especially the museum for a small city, document the profound clarification of thinking Mies achieved at that time.

So to begin with the thesis. Mies's architecture is driven by his aesthetic insights. For my subject I want to concentrate on four related manifestations of this thesis, roughly ten years apart. The first event took place around 1920, and it is perhaps the most famous. As he was considering the problem of the tall building, he "discovered by working with actual glass models that the important thing is the play of reflections and not the effect of light and shadow as in ordinary buildings." This insight, that a glass enclosed architecture would rely on new aesthetic principles, replaced the traditional consideration of light and shadow against an opaque mass. Instead the glass acted simultaneously to transmit and reflect light, so that one could see through a plane of glass at the same time one saw the surroundings reflected in the surface of the glass. The discovery of this interrelation of interior and exterior space, or private and public space, mediated by thin sheets of glass, implied not only a changed aesthetic, but also a potentially changed culture. An actual or implied reciprocity of vision (or regard or gaze) could easily be imagined to transform broader cultural relations and call into question previous behavior based on separation and invisibility. These qualities are particularly important in Mies's pavilions. In his highrises, the observer may only see through the building at the ground plane, while the angle of vision that obtains when looking up permits only reflections of sky and surroundings when viewed from below. In the pavilions, however, it is usually possible to have a continuity of transparent view, often through several layers. At the same time other reflected moments are offered. In addition, the role of reciprocity cannot be stressed too much. The opacity of a bearing wall building means that the building is seen as a solid mass, and more important, that the landscape disappears when one enters into such a building. Perhaps this is the problem Veronese sought to address when he painted the interiors of the Villa Barbaro. Nonetheless, for all the brilliance of his conceit and its realization, one's views are fixed on and directed at an unchanging scene. On the other hand, in a Mies pavilion, the slightest change in the atmosphere or the movement of an eye creates new images, perspectives and visions. This effect is equally rich when the interior and exterior are balanced in terms of light and temperature, and when conditions are dramatically different, as during a snowfall. At night, the pavilions become reliquaries of light.

It does not damage my thesis that Mies does not act on these insights for some time. He often took a great deal of time to incorporate a formal insight into his practice. The only project of the twenties that suggests these qualities of reciprocity is if we study the brick country house project in plan alone. Only with the Tugendhat House and Barcelona Pavilion does Mies begin to study this concept in depth.

This brings me to the second event, around 1930, when, in studying the problem of the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition of 1929, Mies said that "I gave myself a shock" when he saw that the structure and enclosure could be seen as independent of one another. With regard to the first event, the discovery of the reciprocity of interior and exterior, the independence of structure and enclosure meant that the layering of all vertical enclosing elements could be either opaque, translucent or transparent. In addition, not only would there be a relation between inside and outside, there could be such a relationship between or among the layering components of the interior. The second implication of this discovery is that the floor and ceiling plane are also independent of the structure. Once the column grid is established, the floor and ceiling planes at the Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat house are visually as free as the enclosing planes. No transition, joint or connection is visible between the cruciform, reflective columns and the horizontal planes to which they are visually related. To achieve this image of structural clarity and independence Mies actually used a complex structural system. This allowed visitors to read the book matched marble, onyx, and travertine as planes as thin and fragile as the clear and colored glass. The large reflecting pool, by doubling the image of the pavilion, provided additional confirmation of the independence of horizontal as well as vertical planes. Mies still retained doubts about the relation between the evanescence and immateriality of a temporary building like the Barcelona Pavilion and the use of these phenomenal qualities in a permanent structure. This is confirmed by the Tugendhat House, which is anchored into its hillside and circulated through on a diagonal. In addition the most elaborate technical feat of the house was the window wells which allowed the large sheets of glass in the living level to be lowered out of sight into recesses in the wall below. By removing the presence of the tension between inside and outside, mediated by sheets of glass which would always maintain both reflective and transparent qualities, Mies made the house more the elaborately developed terrace of a traditional, otherwise opaque villa than the full extension of his developing ideas. Schinkel had similar ideas of glazing such zones on some of his villas.

The third event in Mies's development of the pavilion is his discovery that the pavilion and its podium were intimately related. About 1940 he began to speak of his desire to "define not confine space." This implies that he had now begun to credit the continuity of space - both created by the architect in the building and existing beyond it in its surroundings. This is most clearly manifest in two projects of the 1940's, the Museum for a Small City and the Concert Hall. In the museum the pavilion was studied simultaneously for its relation to the broad podium on which it rested, as well as in regard for the surrounding landscape. In many of these studies Mies adopts the valley that was present in the Resor House project. However in distinction with the earlier pavilion projects, where the pavilion was carefully bounded by the podium, now the pavilion is considered in many relations to the podium. Further, most of Mies's actual buildings of about 1930 responded to surrounding landscape in ordered and hierarchical ways. Now, in these projects, as well as in several others around this time, Mies began to respond to the indeterminacy of unbounded environments. At student parties around this time Mies would often be found gazing at Lake Michigan, noting his pleasure in the blue dawn, that condition at dusk or dawn, where water and sky seem unified in the palpability of their blue atmosphere. The phenomenon that sky and water can be seen as one reinforces the interest Mies was developing in problems of defining indeterminate space.

The fourth event, recorded around 1950, occurred when Mies said,

I did not know how colorful nature really was. But you have to be careful in the inside to use neutral colors, because you have the colors outside. These absolutely change and I would say it is beautiful. [White] was the right color [for buildings] in the country, against the green. I like black too, particularly for cities. Even in our tall glass buildings, you see the sky, and even the city, changing every hour.

He had not understood this until he had been inside the Farnsworth House regarding the surrounding environment of river and meadow and woods. It was exactly this phenomenon of the house structuring - like a gnomon perhaps - the surrounding landscape that emphasized for him the importance of color. This implies that up until 1950 Mies saw the landscape as a black and white photograph - a plane of form and light - but not as a luminous space enlivened by color. With the exception of the trunks of trees - which were opaque, columnar, patterned and shadowed - the elements of the landscape as seen from the Farnsworth House - grasses, flowers, leaves, water, atmosphere and sky - were capable of seeming translucent, reflective and transparent depending on the time of day and the weather. Mies is often reported to have gestured at the patterns of light and color projected or reflected on the surfaces of the Farnsworth House or Crown Hall and say, "There is your frieze." In coming to see color around 1950, Mies had completed a journey of development in which he considered light, structure, space and color in a movement from the study of a hand held model to the contemplation of the world.

In saying that he wanted to define space, Mies assumed that space had qualities which were fundamental and inherent to itself, rather than being the result of an ordering process based on human convention. In such circumstances, it appears Mies had recognized, even become tolerant of, differing systems of order. It is fair to say that his own architecture tended toward the normative. However in explaining the tension between this normative architectural order and an environmental order for which norms might be irrelevant, Mies displays a tolerance for variety and openness some of his interpreters have denied. The tolerance of differing orders derives from a distinction I would make between framing and structuring a landscape. To frame a landscape is to confine it to the order of a picturesque convention that imposes itself on principles of interpretation. By structuring the environment, Mies was creating an ordered point of view, but not ordering what was being viewed. In this situation, the observer might, through attention and study, develop an understanding of such order as existed in the natural world. In the Museum for a Small City project, the pavilion is figural, self defined and enclosed. Both the near space of the podium and the far space of the environment are coherent, independent and neither molded, modeled nor manipulated by the pavilion.

Before moving to the second part of my discussion, let me address a criticism of the thesis I have been developing. As I have been arguing, I think Mies carefully and deliberately expanded and selected those architectural themes which seemed most likely of generating a normative, formal, aesthetic solution. In other words, Mies's work after 1940 - fully half of his career, and by far its most productive in terms of projects and buildings - is the result of a series of reflective and considered choices. The criticism is that even if these were freely made choices (rather than the accommodations forced on him by a triumphant, capitalist, anti-communist, conformist and intolerant America), Mies was making bad choices, unable to recapture the brilliance of Barcelona or Brno. The view that the artist is obligated to continue testing new ideas and possibilities is widely held. For some artists it may prove productive. For Mies, the identification and exploration of big ideas was the core of architecture. He would argue that having discovered how hard it is to invent a new architecture every Monday morning, he was satisfied to explore the richness of expression inherent in a carefully considered architectural language.

Now let me move to the second major element of my presentation, the exploration of my thesis as an intellectual and formal problem Mies set out to solve in regard to the problem of the pavilion and the podium. Here there seem to me to be four major issues that need to be explored. They are first - Mies's identification and resolution of the problem of space; second - Mies's understanding of the potential for an architecture founded on structure, explored through an analysis of the Vitruvian triad; third - the role or contribution of Mies's colleagues in the formation of his ideas; and fourth - the role of his own studies through an eclectic pattern of reading.

Mies's problem with space may be stated as the tension between the layered overlapping planarity of his architecture and the perception that space is volumetric, even robust. For Mies, space is not a void between solids, space itself has form and shape and volume. It may be almost nothing, but never a void. One might even describe this as the translation of Leonardo's aerial perspective to the ground plane. With regard to architectural space, Mies argued, as we have seen, that he wished to confine not define space. This implies, though, that this space derives form the residue of the two dimensional structure of an architecture based on point, line and plane. This idea of architectural space implicitly rejects the single point of view of architecture common since the Renaissance. It also rejects the episodic and balanced view of nature constructed by the picturesque. For Mies, placing a frame around either nature (as in the picturesque) or architecture (as in the one point perspective of the Renaissance) makes space either subservient or trivial in relation to architecture. For his work Mies sought an ordered equilibrium. Consider too the measured, precise, delicate and clear means by which his buildings actually engage space: the stairs that seem to hover, the ceilings that seem to float, the columns or mullions that seem not to touch. All these devices continue this sense of tension between architecture and space, wherein the choices made by the architect challenge the viewer to consider in what other way this would be possible.

The next problem Mies considered in the 30's and 40's may be simplified by being expressed in terms of the Vitruvian triad of commodity, firmness and delight. Although Vitruvius, and especially Alberti, understood the three components to be linked, theoreticians in the nineteenth century - Ruskin, Viollet-le Duc, Semper, Sullivan - tended to identify one of these elements as central, to which the others were subservient. It is probably not too great a generalization to say that of the three possibilities, commodity and delight had the most advocates, and their claims were often supported by criticisms of their presumed challenger. In his writings around the time of the Weissenhof Exhibition in Stuttgart, Mies, too, posed the problem in terms of the demands of commodity and delight. It is possible to say that the Tugendhat House is the result of an analysis of commodity, while the Barcelona Pavilion is a result of an analysis of beauty.

By the time he started teaching in Chicago, Mies had made two moves. In studying the design of the IIT campus, he developed two alternative models. In one, issues of commodity would dominate, while in the other issues of structure had priority. He tried to express both concepts in terms of the layered planes and defined space I have already discussed. The second move was announced in his inaugural lecture, where, in homage to Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies claimed that he would seek to create an organic architecture which would unite two other approaches to architecture Mies identified as the mechanical and the idealistic. As he continued to seek this organic equilibrium, he also began to emphasize the role of reason. This is when he began to quote Thomas Aquinas's observation that "Reason is the first principle of all human work." Mies began to search for an architecture which, through its use of reason, could become genuinely progressive. He had concluded that the standards of both commodity and delight were too arbitrary and subject to ordinary, inevitable change to provide a reasoned basis for a progressive architecture. Mies came to believe that a solution, based on firmness - or structure - had the potential of becoming ordered on a rational basis as a result of the objective analysis of material and circumstance. As with his consideration of architecture and space, he chose structure as the central element of his work. Once he chose what for him was an objective ordering device, the appearance and use of the axis and symmetry in terms of plan and enclosure meant that function and beauty were now ordered on a basis other than the arbitrary.

About a year ago, as part of a series of interviews I was doing with the late Myron Goldsmith, I asked Myron if Mies believed that structure could provide a rational, objective basis for architecture. He laughed and said that of course Mies was not so unsophisticated. Myron, who was a structural engineer as well as an architect, and who studied with Pier Luigi Nervi in Rome in the mid 1950's after fifteen years as Mies's student and colleague, understood that an architecture based on structure required fully as much attention to refinement and expression and detail as one based either on commodity or delight. In other words, whether one argued that delight is the application of the golden section, commodity is the construction of a bubble diagram, or firmness is the correct calculation of moment, architecture, in Mies's and Myron's view, transcends calculation and analysis and reason when it succeeds as an art.

This introduction of my conversation with Myron Goldsmith brings me to the next problem that I want to explore in understanding how Mies came to concentrate so much on the idea of the pavilion and the podium. That is to say, the role of colleagues as sources of ideas, advice, and collaboration. Here, I want to report on the group who worked with Mies in the 1930's and 1940's. All of these people worked directly with Mies in his practice, his teaching or both. They shared his background and experience in most cases, and they recognized in him gifts that they either lacked or were unable to exploit. Before discussing these individuals, let me note briefly that there are numerous other figures who Mies also knew, principally through their work. These include such historical figures as Karl Friederich Schinkel or Hendrik Peter Berlage. He studied Palladio as thoroughly as the brick gothic of the north German plain. Not only did he learn from Peter Behrens and Bruno Paul, his elders and employers, he also learned from such contemporaries as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Nearly everyone who knew Mies before 1950 speaks of his familiarity with a wide range of architecture, as well as painting, sculpture and the graphic arts.

The first individual I want to introduce is Lilly Reich. Beginning in the late 1920's, she and Mies began a design collaboration in which historians have usually credited her gifts with color, texture and presentation. In addition she is described as having an impeccable taste. When Reich visited Mies in Chicago in the summer of 1939, he drew on her again as a collaborator, particularly in regard to his project for the Resor House and the new campus of IIT. By the beginning of 1939, Mies had developed the two plans that are often, inaccurately, called the preliminary and final plan. In fact they were developed simultaneously and then studied comparatively for some time, even after the IIT plan had been selected. The conversations between Mies and Reich, as recalled by Mies's draftsman George Danforth, centered on the fundamental character of the two plans. They came to agree that the "preliminary" plan was too picturesque and volumetric, while the selected plan was objective, rational and structural. Mies and Reich were both familiar with the arguments of the 20's and 30's that an architecture drive by function was both rational and objective. Their respect for that position is demonstrated by the care with which they studied Mies's design based on those principles. Their willingness to reject one argument and substitute another, as they did here, further demonstrates the seriousness with which they took their position. Reich was to return to Germany just after the invasion of Poland, and while Mies sent her food, money and even materials to accomplish commissions he helped her secure after the war, they were not to see one another again. Instead, Mies would develop collaborative relationships with key members of his office, including Myron Goldsmith, Joseph Fujikawa and Gene Summers, in which the younger colleague was expected to offer judgments, ideas and suggestions as part of the development of particular projects.

The second person who helped Mies between 1930 and 1950, as he developed his mature manner, was Walter Peterhans. As Mies had done at the Barcelona Pavilion, Peterhans had made a series of photographs in which light and form, but not mass or volume, was recorded through the projection or recording of light and plane in space. Thus Peterhans was able to help Mies refine the IIT plan in terms of the overlapping and interpenetrating planes and spaces. The development of the IIT buildings, with the enclosure attached to the outer side of the gridded structure, created an expression of carefully layered and juxtaposed planes. As he had throughout his career, Mies used the model to study the three-dimensional implications of the layering of two-dimensional planes. Peterhans's direct contribution to Mies's own work occurred from the time of the IIT campus design to the Farnsworth House, roughly the 1940's. It is in this period that Mies either refined or identified the key elements of what I have characterized as his American career. Determining just how the underlying structure needed to be brought to the surface as either a fact (the Farnsworth House) or an expression (IIT), either necessary (Museum for a Small City) or incidental (Concert Hall project) aided Mies as he worked with Peterhans in realizing that the pavilion provided the greatest opportunity to have the structure operate as a necessary fact of all levels of the design.

Ludwig Hilberseimer's contribution derived from his own integration of his highly rational urban design method of the 1920's and his garden city influenced ideas from the 1930's on. At the core of the process, Hilberseimer found himself taken by the patterns to be found in many kinds of replicative order, whether leaves, trees, or forests. He came to believe that the presence of pattern at every scale from the crystal to the global required the architect or city planner to determine the informing patterns of their own work and see that they were present at every level of the project. To the extent that this idea presented a metaphor for a coherent and subtle architecture, based on the choice of an ordering device, Mies was happy to benefit from Hilberseimer's suggestions. When the metaphor became an algorithm in which the pattern was revealed as an inevitable result of rational method, Mies became skeptical. Hilberseimer continued his advocacy, but it had progressively less influence after the 1940's.

Hilberseimer did introduce Mies to one of his graduate students, Alfred Caldwell, who came to design the landscape plantings for many of Mies's projects in the 1950's, including Lafayette Park in Detroit as well as the IIT campus. Caldwell had studied at Taliesen with Frank Lloyd Wright and in Chicago with Jens Jensen, the Danish landscape architect who codified a simplified prairie landscape aesthetic in the 1930's. Caldwell adopted this method. When he began studying city planning with Hilberseimer, Caldwell saw that patterns of development - whether a tree, a city, or a building - could be understood as deriving from the same logic. When he began working with Mies, Caldwell brought an approach that combined assurance with landscape design with sympathy for Mies's aims. He also understood that to show Mies's buildings well, both the canopy and the understory of trees should be visually ordered in their branching patterns and visually transparent throughout the year.

This brings me to my final set of ideas that Mies was working with in this period of the 1930's and 1940's. Ideas and themes associated with Mies's earlier career will reappear, and I will introduce new concepts that he began to deal with as well. This is also an opportunity to introduce a point about method. Although Mies matured and practiced in a world in which many intellectuals sought to establish an ideology which addressed all circumstances, even a brief reading of Mies's writings makes it clear that he was not part of such a scheme. Such ideological innocence offers students two main choices. One is to assume an underlying, hidden, even subconscious ideology, which plays out through his work. The other is to identify the problems he chose to solve and the means he chose to solve them. This is what I have been attempting to do. For me this means that I must try to pay very close attention to the formal qualities of his architecture. It means as well that I am trying to reconstruct his own patterns of thought - by studying what he read, wrote and said at the time - in order to argue how Mies informed himself in order to make his decisions.

Let me now turn to the first pair of figures important to Mies during this time from about 1930 to 1950. Mies's admiration of Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas is well known. That each represents, in part, conflicting threads in intellectual history - the platonic and aristotelian traditions - seems never to have bothered Mies. If he recognized such complications at all, he appears to have rejected them in favor of some sort of higher unity. For instance, although Augustine said that beauty is the reflection of truth - thus indicating its distance from and dependence on the True - Mies chose to express this concept "Beauty is the splendor of truth." Here, if anything, beauty occupies a higher position than truth. This becomes important around 1940 because Mies begins to talk about the importance and kinds of order that exist, and he pointed to Augustine's distinctions of understanding that different kinds of things - assuming a hierarchy of value - behave according to the particular order which governs them. The person chiefly responsible for this addition in his thinking is Rudolf Schwarz, the priest and architect, whose book The Church Incarnate was characterized by Mies as one of the great books. Although Schwarz did not doubt the eternal truth of the church's teaching, he did argue that history - as expressed in the changes in cultural organization - implied that the relation between believers and the mystery of the church would change over time and that the organization of church buildings would change to reflect these circumstances. For Mies this meant that while the expression of order might change over time, the need for an ordered relationship among the members of a culture would remain central. Coupled with the Augustinian concept of a variety of orders and their distinct demands and hierarchies, Mies is able to continue to find relevance in Augustine as an expression of both eternal and contingent truths.

It should be obvious that Mies's continuing respect for Saint Thomas Aquinas was reinforced in this period when he found a logical and rational claim for the importance of architecture based on structure. Mies's own experience as a child at the Cathedral School in Aachen would have exposed him to the Thomist influence current in many educational circles of the Roman Catholic life. When he came to Chicago, one of the writers he read as he tried to understand the particular needs and character of American culture and education was the French Thomist, Jacques Maritain, who had recently joined the faculty of Notre Dame University in nearby South Bend, Indiana. If they met, it would likely have been through the seminars at the University of Chicago organized by John Nef. However, Mies read three of Maritain's books, in English, and drew on them for his own development of the IIT curriculum. With their emphasis on the use of reason, and the argument that such an approach was particularly suited to the culture of the United States, Maritain made points that were sympathetic to Mies's developing position. This reinforced Mies's interest in the logical and rational character of an architecture based on structure. However, Mies continued, as I have already indicated, to study alternate problem solving methods at the same time he explored structural solutions in increasing depth.

In addition to the continuing importance of Augustine and Aquinas as modified and extended by Schwarz and Maritain, Mies routinely read in the field of popular or interpretive writing on the physical and natural sciences. The nearly fifty titles, published between 1908 and 1938, by Raoul Fránce on topics in natural history served to reinforce and extend his sympathy for the relation between the character of the processes of natural science and, metaphorically, the processes of reasoning about architecture. This was particularly strong in terms of understanding the extension or implication of ideas. Here, one should note, Mies did not include among his American reading the writings, particularly as they related to this subject, of Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan and Wright, as well as their American, French and English antecedents (I am thinking particularly of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman; Viollet-le-Duc; and Ruskin, Owen Jones, and Morris). This points, though, to a pattern that Mies did not, at least by the time he came to America, read extensively. He was more likely to reread a text already important to him, or a new text that tended to reinforce and extend ideas, than seek out new or opposing points of view. He was confident enough in what he did know when he came to America not to begin the process again. Another example of this reinforcing reading, which Mies treated metaphorically, was in crystal theory, a discipline Mies considered revelatory of the fundamental logic of physical matter. In a copy of a book on crystallography he underlined the phrase "beinahe nicht" (almost nothing) which he often used in describing what he hoped to achieve in his own work.

[Kevin Harrington is a Professor of Architectural History at the Illinois Institute of Technology.]