Anat David-Artman, Architect. M.A. philosophy.
Hebrew University and
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.
Anatd28@mscc.huji.ac.il.
The buildings of Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) have a quality of extreme emptiness, stronger than that found in other modernist buildings. Mies used to say that the source of his architecture was life and not form.[[1]] It is possible, therefore, to interpret this emptiness as renouncing all formal excess and centering on the service of life itself. My claim, nevertheless, is that Mies did not manage to serve life because he did not acknowledge the paradox that life contains. The paradox lies in that life as an incessant flux resists imprisonment in form, but it needs form in order to exist. One can say that in Mies’s refusal to deal with anything formal he arrived at such a radical purification of life that in the end life itself could not exist any more, or at least not in its human expression. In the first part of this paper I will try to expound this claim and in the second part I will try to demonstrate it in several of Mies’s buildings.
a. Mies
and the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie)
A characterization of the paradoxical nature of life can be found in the writings of the German sociologist George Simmel (1858-1918), who belongs to the school called “philosophy of life”.[[2]] Life, says Simmel, is a homogeneous process that cannot be divided. Form, on the other hand, is what binds several elements together into a unity differentiated from all the things around it. Life is a being that does not limit itself and in fact every limitation brings life to a dead ally, therefore life always strives to transcend any given form, whether organic, spiritual or objective. But life can be realized only through individuals, that is creatures closed in on themselves and totally separate. While the stream of life flows through all individuals, in any one of them it becomes a definite form, distinguished from any other individual. Life is a continuous stream but its bearers are individuals, closed around themselves. Put in another way, life is something embodied in a sharply outlined form, but perpetually striving to transcend its own limits. It takes up a form but breaks it. It is complete but continues to develop. Life’s greatest capacity is to transcend itself. Simmel sums this up by saying that life’s transcendence is immanent.[[3]]
The opposition between life and form assumes spatial expression as opposition between outside and inside and temporal expression as opposition between new and old. Life is sometimes said to be the internal side of the living organism, as against form, which characterizes the non-organic world around it. But, as often with paradoxes, we can turn this one around and say that the external is like the stream of life whereas form is what contained inside. In that case life would be understood as contrary to spirit or mind, which creates rigid formal conceptual structures that stop every flow. In fact, the very opposition between inside and outside is understood as part of form, whereas life, as mentioned above, lacks divisions. In any cultural history, says Simmel, exist two contradictory principles: one is systematic, striving to bring a certain form to perfection, and the other progressive, striving to adapt itself to the changing conditions of life. At a certain moment in culture form instead of being a means to life becomes its object. Simmel claimed that we see in order to live, but the artist lives in order to see.[[4]] This is an example of the temporal opposition, mentioned above, between life and form.
Simmel describes modern ideology as a will to affirm life and to reject form, not as a specific form, the rejection of which would be typical to any change of style, but a rejection of form as form.[[5]] A good illustration of the temporal version of the opposition, can be found in “The Modern” (1890) by Hermann Bahr, who says that outside “life has changed totally, but the spirit has remained old and rigid…” To let life in “We need do nothing, but eliminate the barrier between interior and exterior…”[[6]] One can see that the main objective is to cancel the formal partition between the internal and the external, in order to allow access to the radically new. While here the use of the words “inside” and “outside” is metaphorical, in modern architectural practice, there were those who wanted literally to abolish the partition between inside and outside. That was also the aim of Mies, who tried to reduce this partition to a transparent skin.
When form is the end there is a tendency toward order, coherence, unity and perfection. When life is the end the tendency is toward functionality.[[7]] Mies stressed that what concerned him was serving life – that is the functional side of architecture; nevertheless many of his buildings are non-functional and have a quality of coherence and formal perfection. The best example is the Farnsworth House, discussed at the end of this article, in which one cannot live at all. In this building Mies achieved such a radical abolition of the separation between inside and outside that life could not continue to exist there. He did not take into account that the function of architecture is not only to provide shelter from the elements, but also to enable privacy and intimacy. Life itself demands the partition between outside and inside and architecture is supposed to supply this need. Life demands the capacity to shut oneself up in a private domain and architecture should enable one to do so. Life demands the preservation of the memory of the old, which exists “inside”, and architecture is expected to store these memories. Mies’s contemporary, Adolf Loos (1870-1933), acknowledged this fact and thought that the very idea of a transparent house was a mistake. Loos proposed a radical division between the inside, related to memory, psychology and private affairs, which should not be exposed, and the outside face, which is meant to function like a suit that hides the private personality of men.[[8]]
Mies’s error was that he did not acknowledge that life itself demands form in order to exist. As a modernist his resistance to form as form reveals a purely abstract concept of life. The very contradiction between life and form is nothing but an abstraction constructed by the mind, as such, it belongs more to form than to life. Life itself contains both the concept of life as a formless stream and the form in which this stream is embodied.
As we saw above, Simmel maintained that modernist ideology rejects not only existing form, but form as form. Mies followed the same logic in affirming life as life and not some actual embodiment of life. Put differently, Mies affirmed life as essence, which is actually a contradictory notion, because life as a continuous stream cannot be grasped as a constant essence. In fact, his search was always for essences, what made him design architectural situations in an ever more extreme manner. Hence the feeling that Mies designed his buildings in such a pure manner that real life could not exist in them. In sum, one can say that instead of enabling life his buildings became ideas of a form of life.
Let us now turn to a few examples illustrating Mies’s struggle to get rid of formalism; at the same time it will become evident how form acquired its own “life”: Mies’s designs passed through a phase in which the struggle to get rid of form achieved strong formal expressiveness and a second phase in which this expressiveness was overcome, but the buildings became ideas one could not live in. The more Mies struggled to get rid of any formal concerns, the less and less did his designs become able to accommodate life.
Mies’s effort to get rid of form is expressed in his search for intrinsic essence and the rejection of any external excessive dressing, but in the end it brings him to eliminate interiority rather than external features. Mies realized Bahr’s dream - the “life” outside penetrates inside, but that is exactly what prevents any possibility of life inside.
Mies built his first house as an independent architect in 1907. It was designed for the philosopher Professor Riehl and his wife.[[9]] The plan seems quite conventional: two floors which contain a series of well-defined rooms, organized more or less symmetrically around a central hall. The facades present a homely appearance, under a huge roof which “protects warmly”[[10]] and shelters life inside. The internal space is well separated from everything surrounding it. In this phase of his career it seems that Mies let life exist in its traditional forms: the borders between outside and inside and between one room and another are well defined and the connections between the spaces are made by means of conventional doors and windows. The house is plain and barely ornamented, but this simplicity was within the range of contemporary conventions.
The only unusual feature is the arcade in the lower garden façade, which rises directly from the terrace wall. Here the undermining of the conventional distinctions between house and surroundings may be said to begin, the terrace becoming an integral part of the house. Fritz Neumeyer compares this house to the crematorium built by Mies’s teacher – Peter Behrens – in the same years.[[11]] The basis for this comparison between buildings with such diverse functions (the one for life the other for death) is that both treat the site as a terrace and the terrace as a pedestal on which the building is elevated. But while in the Behrens case the material of the building differs from that of the terrace and the building is set back from the terrace wall and is reached by means of monumental steps – thus the building is clearly separated from its surroundings - in the case of Mies the house and the garden become one. We can detect here the first signs of Mies’s efforts to annul the formal division between inside and outside, in the name of life, which has no divisions before it is given form. Nevertheless, in this building Mies did not reach the extremes typical of his later years, and life can still actually take place in this house under the roof which “warmly protects” the inhabitants.
b.2 – The Glass Skyscraper
- 1921
In 1921 Mies entered a competition for a skyscraper on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. The plan was triangular consisting of three acute trefoils. The building was to be entirely covered with glass and it makes an impression of something almost immaterial.
It was published in Fruhlicht the journal of Expressionist architects, and in light of its expressive form one might mistake it as representing the spirit of Expressionist Architecture.[[12]] The Expressionists tried to convey through irregular geometries the excitement of life as opposed to the rigidity of “form” as it figures in conventional orthogonal geometry. But their very concern for geometry affirms their formal approach. Mies used mainly rigid orthogonal geometry for his buildings and he did not aim at new forms but rather at essences (of column, wall, roof and floor). However, in this particular skyscraper we can still feel a tendency toward expressive forms, in spite of Mies’s efforts to withdraw from any expressionistic ideology.
Though this project reminds one of a crystal, which for the Expressionists was a mystic symbol reflecting infinity,[[13]] Mies took pains to distance himself from any mysticism in regard to this building. The reasons he gave for choosing the unusual shape were the shape of the site, the need to let light penetrate and the wish to use the reflections in order to avoid the lifeless effect which he thought typical of certain glass buildings.[[14]] The last reason evidently does not address the functional aspect of life as do the two others but rather its expression (effect)[[15]]. In fact, after 1924 Mies changed his terminology: he did not talk so much about technology (the functional aspect) as a goal, but rather about spirit – that is the aim of building is to express spirit.[[16]] However, this spirit is not related to the mystical spirituality of the Expressionists; it is more like the spirit of life that gives breath to the building.
In the twenties there was a tendency to eliminate representation from painting and sculpture. One of the formal distinctions which the image of life tries to eliminate, is that between representation and its referent. The use of the metaphor of life can suggest an immediate ”presence”, as against the “dead” sign in representation. In Architecture this tendency can be seen in the wish to eliminate the partition separating the internal from the external. Peter Blake says that we can read Mies’ proposal for the glass skyscraper as a statement similar to Kasimir Malevich’s painting “White on White”. As this painting is a sort of empty tablet placed before the world in order to receive new systems of images, so Mies’s building functions as a sort of mirror before the world, reflecting new systems of forms.[[17]] But unlike Mies’s skyscraper Malevich’s painting remains opaque, which leaves him in the sphere of representation, even though representation of absence. The painting fluctuates between pure materialism – there is no more to it than white canvas, and pure symbolism – the white represents the spirit inside that no external image can express.[[18]] The transparency in Mies’s building, on the other hand, disallows the possibility of a materialistic reading as well as of a symbolic one. The building would reflect images like a mirror, but a mirror does not represent reality; it reflects it. A mirror depends constantly on the real presence of the image it reflects. The mirror thus enables the reflection of the flux of life instead of the fixation of form. As we saw above such constantly changing reflection was aimed at achieving the effect of life. But what this building could catch was not life itself, but only its reflection, i.e. only an effect. Whereas in Malevich’s painting what is eliminated is the outside and we are left with merely a spiritual inside in which nothing external is reflected, what is lacking when a building becomes a mirror is the inside, because the external continues to be reflected in it. But in this case, the inside only seemingly disappears while in fact it remains sufficiently protected from a penetrating glance, and thus private life can still exist there.
b.3 – The Brick House –
1923-1924
In 1924-1923 Mies designed a theoretical project called the Brick House. The house is made of freestanding brick walls and transparent screens in between, so that it does not consist of definite volumes. The brick walls continue beyond the boundaries of the house, in such a way that the same wall shifts from internal to external. Inside the house the walls do not define rooms, but let spaces interlock. The building is thus not distinct from its surroundings – there is special continuity between inside and outside - nor are the rooms distinct from each other, that is, the room ceases to function as the organizing idea of the house.[[19]]
As I pointed out in the first part of this article, the very idea of continuity between inside and outside precludes the possibility of the existence of private life which architecture is supposed to enable thus actually undermining the essence of architecture itself. We can see the problems in Mies’s stand when we compare it to that of Adolf Loos. Both held that the aim of architecture was not an aesthetic one. The house, says Loos, does not belong to art but to life.[[20]] But they differ in their interpretation of the role of the house in life. Loos acknowledged the importance of the division between inside and outside and therefore in his buildings we can find a simple functional exterior combined with an interior rich with objects of sentimental value. Loos accepted the situation described by Bahr of an outside full of changing life while the inside belonged to the old fashioned past, but, contrary to Mies and Bahr, he did not think that this could be changed. The distinction between outside and inside is essential to the house and the duty of the architect is not to obscure but to emphasize it. The very claim of Loos, that there is a difference between architecture, which belongs to life, and art, which is against life, reflects his desire to make clear distinctions between different realms. Even though these distinctions spring from “form” and not from “life”, this “formal” approach is what makes Loos’s buildings livable. One can live in them in the full sense of human living, amass belongings, remember, and feel. Although Mies shared with Loos his distaste for an aesthetic approach to architecture, his reasons were different. He did not want to distinguish the realms of life and art, but to “return” to the state “before” every distinction, in which every human activity was aimed at sustaining life. Even though he had an idea of a new living form, not dictated by the outdated “form” of the room, the plan of the Brick House looks more like a painting by Theo van Doesburg than a place one can live in.[[21]] We can already feel Mies’s tendency to touch at extremities in negating architectural form in his buildings, bringing him eventually to negate the central role of architecture in the service of life – the erecting of partitions between spaces.
b.4 – The Barcelona
Pavilion - 1929
The Barcelona pavilion, erected in 1929, is perhaps Mies’s best-known work. It is a one-story building raised on a pedestal and has no specific function. Eight cross-shaped section steel columns covered with chrome support the flat slab covering the building. The internal space is divided by glass partitions and different sorts of marble and precious travertine. The space in between them flows with no definite “rooms”. Some of these partitions continue beyond the boundaries of the covered space. The shining materials and the two pools, which are coved with glass, reflect their surroundings. The exhibits are few: a sculpture of a nude woman by Georg Kolbe and a few pieces of furniture designed by Mies himself.
Mies’s buildings do not try to “talk” or to convey messages, but to “live”. However, the silence and emptiness in this pavilion are so pure that the theoretician Manfredo Tafuri received the impression of “…a language of empty and isolated signifiers in which things are portrayed as mute events.”[[22]] He goes on to say that in this space there is no possibility of restoring “synthesis”. Mies was in fact aiming at synthesis, that is at life, which abolishes any distinctions. But Tafuri does not misrepresent Mies’s intention without reason. The search for life as essence – before any formal differentiation – is doomed to failure because the idea of essence of life is contradictory – life is an incessant flux and cannot have a permanent essence. The pavilion was thus tenably read by Tafuri not as a living system outside any language (which is always formal), but as a language emptied of content. The abolition of the clear division between outside and inside and the extreme emptiness do not make one feel the immediate presence of life, but rather leave the impression of empty signs, or death.
b.5 Farnsworth House –
1945-1950
In the Farnsworthe house, built between 1945-1950 in Illinois, the modernist vision of the first half of the twentieth century, of diffusing inside and outside, reaches such pure expression that the inside has almost totally disappeared. The internal space is defined only by a transparent “skin” – a glass envelope. The columns supporting the roof and the elevated floor – the “bones” – are external to this envelope (Mies used to talk in terms of “skin and bones” – seemingly a metaphor taken from the realm of life, but actually with a connotation of a dead or at least sick body).[[23]] In one direction both the floor and the roof continue beyond the enclosure, which blurs the distinction between outside and inside even more. The distinction is farther obscured by an additional platform, connected to the house only by a stair. The stare is made of unconnected steps in such a way that the “outside” flows freely between them. “Internal” space is divided only by one solid bathroom. The building lets the eye penetrate through it into nature on the other side. In other times of the day the glass wall reflects nature in front of it. In either case the inside is reduced to mere isolation from weather and noise. The elimination of the inside came about from Mies’s persistent search for the intrinsic,[[24]] which made him reveal interiority and thus negate its essence. In his resistance to external appearance Mies arrived precisely at the elimination of the internal.
The elimination of interiority makes this house
unlivable. When Dr. Edith Farnsworth described the experience of living in her
modernist glass box she claimed she felt
restless, like a "prowling animal", because she was being observed at
all times. The house failed to provide protection from the outside. Its
negotiation with the outside world did not provide enough privacy for Dr.
Farnsworth to relax.[[25]]
I would suggest that the consequences of this elimination of interiority was
that the two principles of human life, as Simmel describes them, cannot dwell
in it simultaneously. Life, says Simmel, is “more life” and also “more than
life”, i.e. life necessarily produces more life and life produces things, which
have value beyond life itself. Life can exist only as more life, because the
effort to preserve life always implies self-generation. Only as long as
self-generation exists does life exist at all. Growing, multiplying, aging and
dying are not something added to life, but life itself. One can say that life
is a constant movement, which incessantly takes into itself something in order
to transform it to life. But, at the same time this process produces something
that transcends life – it produces form, which at first is made in the service
of life, but later becomes something independent which does not have a direct
bond to life. Something permanent is produced which is contrary to life.[[26]]
If fertility expresses the first principle – “more life”, then culture
expresses the second one – “more than life”. In this house fertility has to
exist in exposed and empty spaces. The purity and transparency of these
spaces allows either abstinence, the betrayal of the principle of fertility, or
fertility without privacy, the elimination of the cultural state. One might
play with Mies’s famous slogan - “less is more”, and say that in this house the
“more” (of life and than life) has to exist in the “less”.
The emptiness in the Farnsworth House is so extreme that one cannot give it any symbolic or representational interpretation, such as was still possible in the case of the Barcelona pavilion. There is no expressive formal pretension as in the glass skyscraper and one cannot compare it to an abstract painting as one could with the Brick House. All the possibilities that still existed in those buildings are reduced to “less” and “less”. But one cannot see in this structure a successful “cleaning” up of everything in favor of life. Here life has come to a dead end together with form. As Simmel observed, even though life is perpetually striving to break form it is something embodied in form. Life transcends every formal limitation but nevertheless needs form in order to exist.
[1] Mies often asserted that his aim was life and not form. All
citations from Mies are from Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word, MIT
Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 1991, See for example “We know no forms, only
building problems. Form is not the goal but the result of our work… There is no
form in and for itself.” In “Building”, ibid, p. 242; “Life is what Matters.”
in letters to “Die Form”, ibid, p. 252; “… strong impulses for living, and a
great urge toward functionality and an undistorted affirmation of life.” in a
lecture given in 1927, ibid, p. 262.
[2] This article is not concerned with the actual influence of Simmel
on Mies. Nevertheless W. Gordon Brown mentions Mies possession of Simmel’s book
on culture in his library. See W. Gordon Brown, “Form as the Object of
Experience: George Simmel’s Influence on Mies van der Rohe”, in Journal of
Architectural Education, 43/2 (Winter 1990), pp. 42-46
[3] See Georg Simmel, “The Transcendent Character of Life”, in Individual
and Social Forms, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1971, pp. 353-374.
[4] See, Georg Simmel, “ The Conflict of Modern Culture”, in The
Conflict of Modern Culture and Other Essays, Teachers College Press,
Columbia University, New York, 1968, pp. 11-26. See also Rudolf H. Weingartner,
Experience and Culture in The Philosophy of George Simmel, Wesleyan
University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 1962, p.55.
[5] Simmel, The Conflict, pp. 12-13
[6] Hermann Bahr, “The Modern”, in the Appendix to Francesco Dal Co, Figures
of Architecture and Thought, Rizzoli, New York, 1990. pp 288-291.
[7] Weingartner, Experience, p. 60
[8] See Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos, Rizzoli, New York,
1988, p. 51.
[9] About the Riehl House see Neumeyer, pp. 36-50, and Elaine S.
Hochman, Architects of Fortune, ld &Weidenfe Nicolson,
New York, 1989. pp. 32-35.
[10] The architect Joseph Maria Olbrich described one of his own
buildings in these words. Cited in Dal Co, p 182.
[11] Neumeyer, p. 50
[12] Ibid, pp.3-4.
[13] Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture, Thames and
Hudson, London, 1973, pp. 36-4. See also the opening to the first issue of Fruhlicht, The expressionists’
journal: “High the transparent, the clear! High purity! High the crystal! and
high and ever higher the flowing, the graceful, the sharp-edged, the sparkling,
the flashing, the lightweight – high eternal building!” cited in Neumeyer, p.
3.
[14] Mies, “Skyscapers”, in Neumeyer p. 240.
[15] Evans argues that Mies’s logic in the Barcelona Pavilion, which I
will consider below, is a logic of appearance, so that its aim is effect. Robin
Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays,
Architectural Association, London, 1997, p. 247.
[16] See for example, “…building art is always a spatial execution of
spiritual decisions…” in a lecture from 1926, ibid. 252, or “The problem of the
new housing is basically a spiritual problem…” in the foreword to the catalogue
of the Werkbund exhibition in 1927, Neumeyer p. 258.
[17] Peter Blake, Mies van der Rohe, penguin Books, Baltimore,
1966, p. 28.
[18] For this fluctuation between materialism and symbolism in modern
painting in general see Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”, in The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernists Myths, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1991, pp. 9-19. [?]
[19] “…I have abandoned the usual concept of enclosed rooms…”, from
Mies’s lecture of 1924 in Neumeyer, p. 250; see also p. 179 and p. 247.
[20]Adolf Loos, “Architecture” in The Architecture of Adolf Loos,
An Arts Council exhibition, pp.107-108.
[21] For a list of such comparisons between Mies van der Rohe designs
and De Stil paintings, see: Juan Pablo Bonta, Architecture and its
Interpretation, Lund Humphries, London, 1979. pp.153-161.
[22] Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990, pp. 111-112.
[23] This image appears in his lecture of 1942, see Neumeyer, p. 250.
[24] Neumeyer often stress this
search for the intrinsic. See especially chapter II, section 1. pp. 30-35.
[25] Joseph A. Barry, "Report on the battle between good and bad
modern
houses", In House Beautiful, May (1953), p.270
[26] Simmel, “The Transcendent Character”, pp.368-373.