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Mies van der Rohe at the CCA in Montreal
Donald Maurice Kreis
Bruce Coldham, an Amherst, Massachusetts architect
who designs buildings that are energy efficient and environmentally
sustainable, came to Vermont recently to speak about 'green' design
to the state chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Coldham
showed slides of a grand tour he recently made of beautiful, sustainable
buildings in Europe, and then had this to say about why there are
so few such projects here: "Folks in the U.S. will just put
up with lousy space than an equivalent group of tenants or users
in Europe."
When pressed, Coldham couldn't explain why this is
so. In fact the answer - or at least some of it - is now on display,
not in the U.S., but in Montreal.
The venue is the Canadian Centre for Architecture,
North America's premier museum and library dedicated to spreading
enlightenment about the built environment. The exhibition is Mies
in America, a painstaking and loving exploration of the second and
final phase of the career of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969),
whose significance for American architecture of the 20th Century
is rivaled only by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Mies never built in New England, and yet New Englanders
live in his shadow. Just as every schlocky ranch house in America
can trace its roots to Wright's Prairie Style homes, every banal
box of glass and steel from Burlington to Bellingham grows out of
the awesomely simple and sparse architecture of Mies. Here's the
guy who invented what you think of when you hear the phrase "modern
architecture;" it's worth checking out what he thought he was
doing.
This is more than just another show for the CCA, whose
chair and founding director is architect and writer Phyllis Lambert.
Less than 15 years after Mies fled Nazi Germany, a youthful Lambert
persuaded her father - the distillery magnate Samuel Bronfman -
to commission Mies to design what would turn out to be his greatest
office tower, the Seagram Building in New York. Boldly standing
back from the staid Park Avenue street line, its stark rectangular
form rendered in a rich bronze color, the tower occupies just 25
percent of its site in order to leave its soaring vertical lines
undisturbed by the setbacks that would have otherwise been required
by local zoning rules. This is familiar territory now; in 1958 it
was astonishing.
After making that breakthough possible, Lambert went
on to study with and work for Mies in Chicago. Mies in America is
Lambert's tribute to her architectural hero and teacher.
Now is a propitious time for Lambert and other lovers
of Mies to come out of the closet. Post-modernism - which was all
about fussy decoration and evocation of bygone styles - has faded
from fashion. Today's high-profile architects are eager to acknowledge
their debt to Mies. And, of course, the cruel destruction of the
World Trade Center has unleashed nostalgia for the unadorned rectangular
skyscraper. Mies, after all, designed the original twin towers,
at 860-880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, having figured out that
two big and identical rectangles achieve a kind of sculptural resonance
if sited so they are not simply parallel to one another.
Precisely because Minoru Yamasaki was able to mimic
this architectural effect and build the World Trade Center, and
because countless other designers created similar upended boxes
all across America, it is difficult to grasp how refreshing and
radical these two apartment towers were when their construction
began in 1949. Mies loved the American skyscrapers he saw going
up in the post-war boom - but only during their construction phase,
when the steel superstructure was visible and before the buildings
were covered in masonry designed to evoke classical temples or gothic
cathedrals. So he resolved to express rather than cover up the essential
steel skyscraper-ness of the Lake Shore Drive towers.
As has been well documented at the CCA exhibition,
and oft-noted previously, Mies cheated. The steel I-beams that serve
as mullions for the glass "curtain walls" adorning the
Lake Shore Drive and Seagram buildings, giving them a sense proportion
in the manner of lines on graph paper, look as if they are part
of the building's skeleton. In fact, this is only artifice. Fire
codes necessitated covering in concrete any I-beams that actually
hold up the buildings. Among the best morsels of the CCA exhibition
are an inconspicuous set of cross-sections showing how Mies separated
the curtain walls from the skeletons of these buildings while maintaining
the illusion of connection. This phenomenon is often referenced
in writings about Mies but is difficult to explain non-graphically.
Lambert pronounces one of Mies' final projects - the
New National Gallery in Berlin, completed in 1968 - as the ultimate
expression of what she terms his "difficult art of the simple."
Accordingly, and hauntingly, the exhibition concludes with a room
that uses a giant video screen to place the visitor inside the building's
vast and virtually empty main hall. What one sees is all there is
- four columns, two inconspicuous heating and ventilation units,
a dark and gridded ceiling, and 360 degrees of glass wall revealing
the city that surrounds the building.
You have to visit Berlin to discover that the paintings
in the New National Gallery are consigned to the nearly windowless
basement. The messy business of what people actually do at museums
was of little interest to Mies. Indeed, there is a reason Lambert
included almost no interior views of Mies masterpieces in the exhibition;
Mies was a failure at creating spaces that users would find friendly
and accommodating. Elsewhere one can find photos of the dehumanizing
cubicle farms of the Seagram Building or the windowless, sterile
courtrooms of Mies' federal complex in Chicago.
Still, one grasps at the CCA the glorious essence
of what Mies was seeking to achieve with the New National Gallery:
the expression of pure architectural space, the reduction of form
and materials to their purest and truest selves, the imposition
of rigor, logic and beauty on a world full of turmoil, disorder
and despair. Mies fled precisely such miseries when he departed
Berlin in 1937 and it is deliciously ironic that he achieved his
greatest victory over them in the capital of the Third Reich. How
bittersweet that he did it almost within sight of the Berlin Wall,
with its own sort of architectural attempt to impose order on apparent
chaos.
Mies in America shares the same virtues and vices
of the recently closed Frank Gehry exhibition at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York. In each instance, there is a less-than-arm's-length
relationship between the museum and the architect under examination.
(Gehry designed the Guggenheim annex in Bilbao, Spain and its controversial
proposed new branch in lower Manhattan.) The result is adoration,
not criticism. But Lambert has examined Mies' American period with
a thoroughness that only an enthusiast can truly muster, presenting
everything from the painters and writers Mies admired to the engineering
details over which he labored.
As Tom Wolfe bitingly argued 20 years ago in From
Bauhaus to Our House, the artistic purity of Mies and fellow German
exiles like Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer helped make architecture
irrelevant to generations of Americans. You may follow music, cinema
and the visual arts, but chances are you have not heard of great
contemporary architects like Renzo Piano, Jose Rafael Moneo, Zaha
Hadid or even such important Vermont practitioners as Michael Singer
or Turner Brooks. Americans suffer lousy buildings because they
have forgotten that anything else is possible.
Still, Mies had artistic truth on his side, and for
good reason his work endures while more recent postmodern frippery
is allowed to crumble along with cheapo imitations of Miesian masterpieces.
You might not want to live in a glass house the way Mies client
Edith Farnsworth did, but see the Mies exhibition at the CCA anyway
before it closes on January 20. There's nothing to the Farnsworth
House but white-painted steel, clear glass, the green world outside
- and the still-unrealized hope that some day an heir to the Mies
tradition will persuade Americans that the 'difficult art of the
simple' is preferable to the oppressive homes and workplaces that
we now endure without complaint.
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