The book begins in 1905 with a trainsick Mies retching out of a railway car window while traveling from his native Aachen to Berlin and the start of a big-time career. It ends with Mies`s passing in 1969, when the cancer-ravaged genius lay in his bed at Chicago`s Wesley Memorial Hospital, clutching a bunch of yellow roses placed in his hands by one of his children just a moment after death.
This is the story of the 20th Century`s most influential architect.
”Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography,” by Franz Schulze (University of Chicago Press, 348 pages, $39.95) is, very simply, the most comprehensive book ever written about the master designer and, by any measure, the best. While it is also what one might call an authorized biography–although Schulze does not so characterize it–the book is no exercise in sycophancy. Mies is drawn as the immensely talented giant he was, but also as a man of excesses, selfishness and the kind of single-mindedness that seems always to be freighted with arrogance.
On the eve of the centennial year of Mies`s birth, it is difficult to envision a scholarly contribution of greater substance than this one. The exhibitions, lectures and seminars focused on Mies in 1986 will advance the documentation, analysis and appreciation of the architect`s work. Yet surely nothing will carry more lasting value than this biography.
No other chronicler of Mies has drawn so deeply on archival material and on the memories of those who knew him. Schulze, a professor of art at Lake Forest College, searched thoroughly through the substantial Miesian holdings of New York`s Museum of Modern Art. He also mined the lesser known but rich Mies material at the Library of Congress.
Beyond that, Schulze has drawn with great success on the recollections of persons who were close to Mies professionally and emotionally. Many of those interviewed glitter with architectural brilliance of their own: Joseph Fujikawa, George Danforth, Bertrand Goldberg, Gene Summers, Alfred Caldwell, Jacques Brownson, Gordon Bunshaft and others.
Family members who talked freely with Schulze included Mies`s two surviving daughters, Georgia and Marianne (a third, Waltraut, died in 1959, and Mies had no sons). The single most valuable contributor of information was Dirk Lohan–a grandson of Mies, eventually a colleague of Mies and today a distinguished Chicago design practitioner in his own right. Architectural figures from abroad as well as the United States lent assistance.
Schulze has taken this formidably large and inevitably unwieldy mass of information and crafted it into a finely structured prose composition good enough to be called literature. In Schulze`s hands, the facts about Mies, the man, and Mies, the architect, comprise an almost seamless fabric–even as they did in life. The story is also told largely in chronological order, which serves its audience well. This is a genuinely readable book, unlike so many of the jargon-ridden and convoluted works that afflict the field of architecture. Because no writer has ever before probed into Mies`s life at such depth, we have here the first definitive reconstruction of the architect`s personal habits, loves, fears, triumphs, loneliness and (in his old age) agonies. Until Schulze put his mind to this biography, Mies was a one-dimensional man for most of us–a taciturn and crochety-looking cigar smoker who turned out elegant black buildings while occasionally dropping such aphorisms as ”Less is more,” ”God is in the details” and ”You cannot invent a new
architecture every Monday morning.”
But of course there was a great deal more to him than that, and perhaps we can be forgiven if we particularly savor some of the most personal revelations and anecdotes about this man whose buildings were imitated–for better or worse–in virtually every major city of the world. Schulze tells us in detail, for example, about:
— How Mies and his wife, Ada, separated in 1921 and never lived together again–although they were never divorced. The arrangement suited Mies well, for while he afterward enjoyed many brief and extended romantic liaisons, he seemed to feel that the conventional day-to-day responsibilities of marriage would be a hindrance to his consuming pursuit of architectural perfection. Ada died in Germany in 1951.
— The manner in which Mies took up with German fashion designer Lilly Reich in 1925 and permitted her to remain his constant companion for 13 years, after which he simply closed the poor woman out of his life.
— How Mies unheroically and foolishly tried to get along with the Nazis, even to the point of sketching an imperial German eagle on a drawing for one of his projects and a swastika on another. He did do his best to save the Bauhaus from its fascist political critics. In the end, however, Mies rubbed the Gestapo the wrong way and had to flee Germany with a few belongings stuffed into one suitcase.
— The close relationship between Mies and Lora Marx, which lasted from 1940 until his death. Lora liked to drink even more than Mies, whose capacity was legendary. The two of them went out with Chicago architect Alfred Shaw and his wife one night, got riotously drunk and with lipstick decorated a marble nymph in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel. On another memorable evening, Mies and his party wound up in a striptease dive on North Clark Street.
— The celebrated relationship between Mies and Edith Farnsworth, a wealthy Chicago doctor. Edith commissioned the architect to do a house, apparently engaged in a fleeting romance with him, then dueled with him in court for months over the price of the job. Mies won and was awarded $14,000. Farnsworth House, of course, is today one of the most architecturally celebrated residences in the world.
Schulze gives us dozens of anecdotes about lesser matters, invigorates them by using direct quotes and often sheds light on Mies`s thinking processes in the bargain. For example, he tells of the time Mies questioned architect George Danforth about his tastes in music:
”Why is is that you like chazz?” Mies asked Danforth.
”Because it is so improvisational,” came the reply.
”Tja,” returned Mies, struggling to uphold the rule of reason in art,
”but you must be careful with improvisation, no?”
And so go the memories of Mies, the man, as gathered from dozens of sources.
Schulze is unstinting of facts in his reconstruction of how Mies was lured to Chicago, the role he played at Illinois Institute of Technology
(where he headed the architecture school) and the manner in which he ran his private practice. While Mies attained his greatest eminence in Chicago, he never cared much for the city`s architectural legacy. Mies disliked the heavy masonry facades on old Chicago buildings and was particularly critical of Louis Sullivan`s use of ornamentation.
All of the familiar architectural matters one would expect to find in a Mies biography are well attended to by Schulze. The internationally famous buildings–from the Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House to the Seagram Building and 860-880 N. Lake Shore Dr.–are presented by Schulze in their essential details, always in appropriate historical perspective and often with fresh insights. Nor does the biographer neglect the influence of other designers (Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, et al) on Mies, or fail to recount professional relationships that fell apart–that with Philip Johnson being the most notable.
Influences outside the field of architecture are also explored. Early on, Mies was moved by the gloomy ruminations of historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, and in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas Mies found an intellectual path to the artistic expression of spiritual truths. Later, he was also deeply moved by the cerebrations of Jacques Maritain and D`Arcy Thompson.
Schulze helps us make the tenuous but demonstrable connections between philosophical abstraction and Mies`s buildings, as when he explains:
”Technology for Mies . . . was an entity of spiritual as well as physical significance. It was the Zeitgeist manifest. It was fact, and the materials of steel and glass, themselves light enough to approach a dematerialized state, could lift fact to the level of essence, thus to Truth in the desired immaterial sense.”
In the last few years of his life, Mies suffered great pain and other discomfort, first as a victim of acute arthritis and finally of esophageal cancer. It was during the same period, more or less, that the kind of modernist architecture in which Mies believed so passionately came under serious attack.
”During the 1960s,” writes Schulze, ”the modern movement . . . seemed motivated less by a sense of mission and more by a reliance on a formula certified by corporate success. Many observers felt forced to the conclusion that the search for a binding, logically expressed grammar of architectural form had produced less purity of expression (and) more sterility. Mies`s deductive manner of drawing buildings out of fixed concepts rather than from particular needs seemed impossibly outmoded.”
Mies ultimately ”became a lightning rod that attracted most of the thunderbolts of the so-called Postmodern revolution,” Schulze observes. Today, even the work of some architects who once took him as a master ”seems to us often more simply vapid than rational. The counter efforts of many of his detractors already appear mannered and more than a little grotesque.”
Yet the buildings of Mies still stand as those of a giant. Piddling Postmodern pap cannot take away from the strength and integrity of his work, however vulnerable it may be to criticism of sometimes blind dogma. Mies`s teachings continue to influence–even if less observably–many of our greatest new talents, and the cheap knockoffs of his buildings are as easily spotted as dime store pearls.
The coda to Schulze`s remarkable book:
”(Mies`s) place in history is assured not so much by the infallibility of his thinking as by the subtlety and refinement of his art. Less than ever could architecture after Mies escape the implications of discipline, logic and method as driving forces in the profession. . . .
”If he did not divine the epoch, he left his personal stamp on it, this most impersonal of artists; for years it would have to deal with him as surely as he strove heroically to deal with it. Pluralistic as world architecture is near the end of the 20th Century, it is made more so, paradoxically, by the memories of Mies`s singlemindedness.”
