![]() ![]() Wohnreform was a late 19th- and early 20th-century formal and ideological reform of the everyday environment, advocating new spaces at the green edges of the city that would support healthful living and an ethical renewal of German culture. The reexamination begins with his early houses. This led me to reevaluate the importance of surrounding context, whether garden or urban fabric, in Mies’s architecture throughout his career and to understand in a new light some of his statements, drawings, and photomontages. I could see, almost in a flash, the unity of building and landscape developing throughout Mies’s building art, ultimately morphing into the podium that binds the Seagram tower to the urban landscape - plaza, platform, an oasis amid the chaos of New York. 7 In his discussion of the twenty-one-year-old Mies’s first independently built work, a house commissioned by the philosopher Alois Riehl and his wife, Sofie, in 1906, and completed in 1907, Bergdoll wrote that Mies “bound house and garden together to form a podium.” 8 Reading this was for me an epiphany. This way more is asked from nature, because it is becomes a part of a larger whole.” 6 This, a long-held concern, must have been almost innate in him, a given, like everyday things to be attended to.īarry Bergdoll has definitively connected Mies with the German Wohnreform movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If you view nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth house, it gains a more profound significance than if viewed from outside. … We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity. In America, only in talking about the Farnsworth house did Mies express his sensitivity to site: “Nature should also live its own life. Strong principles underlay his architectural design, what he called the “building art,” yet Mies’s buildings and building complexes were mostly informed by the particularities of the surrounding context and the special circumstances of their sites. ![]() During his American years, he declared more than once that his first job was to design a good building, and only then could he take into consideration the surroundings. To a great degree, Mies himself is responsible for this gap in the reception of his work. ![]() ![]() 5 While this may be so, it really doesn’t get to the essence of the matter of Mies’s deep interest in the interrelationship of building and landscape, which historians and critics have largely overlooked. As an urban space it is more closely related to the more intimate enclosed space of Mies’s courthouses than to the urban spaces which Mies had either proposed or built.” 4 In my text, I likened the Seagram plaza to the parvis before a cathedral. At the time, Glaeser wrote, “There is no direct precedent for the configuration of the Seagram plaza in the work of Mies van der Rohe. When I directed the 1977 exhibition The Seagram Plaza: Its Design and Use in collaboration with Ludwig Glaeser, then curator of the Mies van der Rohe archive at MoMA, 3 research was not yet far enough advanced. 1 The only publication on Mies before 1950 was Philip Johnson’s exhibition catalogue Mies van der Rohe, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1947. Who noted the contents of the library in Mies’s Chicago living room? Or paid attention when he retold the story of how he had to select 300 books from his collection of 3,000 when he left Germany for Chicago? Mies said that he could have retained just 30, but before that, he would have had to read the 3,000. And Mies’s Zeitgeist? Philip Johnson proclaimed that he was tired of hearing Mies quote Augustine’s “Beauty is the radiance of truth.” A genealogy of the plaza could not have been constructed: the “podium” at 860–880 Lake Shore Drive was not recognized as such. The mullioned high-rise towers of the 1950s did not seem to derive from the sheer glass skyscrapers of the early 1920s. Would or could Mies have retraced his own trajectory? A few iconic buildings were known. What led Mies to create the union of skyscraper and plaza on Park Avenue, a binding together so profoundly important in his oeuvre? In the 1950s, it would have been difficult to answer, let alone to ask. Seagram building plaza panorama, looking south from the first setback of 399 Park Avenue, 2010. ![]()
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