The Big Four (part 2)

Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Walter Gropius (1883-1969)

Worked for Behrens 1910-11 but

was 15 years younger
More concerned with the social
implications of machine
construction
Work must be established in
palaces that give the workman,
now a slave to industrial labour,
not only light, air and hygiene, but
also an indication of the great
common idea that drives
everything. Only then can the
individual submit to the
impersonal without losing the joy
of working together for that
common good previously
unattainable by a single
individual.

Advocated an architecture of
technical rationalism; in this
stage of his career he believed
that the machine can be
spiritualised by means of art
He opposed Mathesius
(typifying) for his legislative,
totalising, bureaucratic
approach
Artistic conceptualisation should
be free and original and not
controlled by the state
bureaucracy and the big
business
Like Behrens: nature and
technology can be transfigured
by spirit (Geist)

Fagus Factory (1911-12)

Shows the differences in

approach between Behrens and
Gropius
Different programme modest,
provincial factory which
allowed for a different agenda:
modesty, lack of symbolic
charge, no grand symbolic
claims (as was the case with
AEG)
It becomes prophetic of the
objective Modern Movement of
the 1920s
Projecting bay windows and
recessed, tilted masonry, similar
to AEG, but:
The tilt is pragmatic; the brick
piers are attempting to
disappear (anti-monumental,
anti-symbolic); the facade
appears made of glass; instead
of buttresses, void corners, no
impressionistic rounding

Its classicism is abstract

and discreet, a matter of
geometry
Its illusionism brings the
transcendental qualities
of materials to the fore
(glass and its mystical
connotations)
Materiality and form are
synthesised in a new
way; art and pragmatism
coexist; no conflict
between Typisierung
and the role of the
individual artist-architect
Prophetic of the new
architectural discourse
to emerge in Germany
around 1923

Weimar Germany, 1920-33

Architecture in Germany around 1922 reflects changes in the visual arts

in general

Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement

The term first used in the context of painting; it is realism with a

socialist flavour

In architecture: Adolf Behne Art, Craft, Technology essay, 1922

division of labour inaugurated by the machine [] brought into play
higher awareness
The worker would come to understand his role within the totality within
the industrialised society similar to Gropiuss views from 1911

Academy of Fine Arts, Weimar

Gropius succeeds Van de Velde as the

director in 1919 and is given the task to
create a new School of Architecture and
Applied Art
He renames the school Bauhaus;
Bauhaus Minifesto 1919
The integration of arts with crafts a standard
by then; Gropius wants to save the
artistic culture from the materialism of
industrial capitalism by a spiritual
revolution
Starts off more expressionist but by 1929
incorporates New Objectivity, De Stijl and
LEsprit Nouveau
This initiated by van Doesburgs presence
in Weimar from 1921 and by ideas from
Russian Constructivism
Turning point in 1923 with the first
Bauhaus Exhibition: Art and Technology:
a New Unity; Gropius pushes an
architectural agenda; model house built
(Haus am Horn)

1925 Bauhaus moves to

Dessau new building
and staff houses
The first major
structures realised in his
dynamic functional
manner
The body of the school
broken into
programmatic elements;
reassembled into an
open form
Influence of both
Constructivism and De
Stijl
Forms are pure
(reflects Le Corbusier
and Oud) while retaining
features (glazing
projected in front of the
wall plane) from
Gropiuss earlier work

Bauhaus Dessau, Directors Office

Walter Gropius, Total Theatre project, 1927

Moholy-Nagy House, Bauhaus, 1925, Desau

Housing programmes in this

period remarkably dominated
by the avant-garde
(precedent in Holland with
Oud and Berlage for
Amsterdam)

Like the Garden Suburbs

before WWI these
Siedlungen were in enclaves
on the outskirts of cities
Higher density and consisted
of apartment blocks up to 5
storeys
Generally organised in
parallel blocks aligned northsouth
Aesthetic rules from Neue
Sachlichkeit stripped of
ornament and flat roofs; use
of coloured surfaces

Rational layouts not always

popular; Adolf Behne
criticesed them

Siemensstadt, 1928, Berlin,

(Gropius)
Some degree of formal
differentiation (overall plan by
Hans Scharoun)
General divide in Germany of
the period (marked by Behne):
functionalists versus rationalists
The former come from
Expressionism unique
buildings; the latter derive
solutions applicable to various
cases
Examples often straddle both to
various degrees (Hans
Scharoun, Schminke House,
1933, Loebau)

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

Gropius had a reputation in organisation

Mies had it in aesthetics

Reduced all problems to a kind of essential

simplicity

Two opposing tendencies in his work:

enclosure of function in a general cubic
container (partly derived from his neoclassical
early stage) and the articulation of the building
in response to the fluidity of life (but not figural
as with Expressionists)
Neutral forms create systems flexible enough
to respond to any situation; configurations are
unique, while their constitutive elements are
similar
His projects between the wars show the
struggle between neoclassical objectification
and Neoplasticist fragmentation

Riehl House, 1907. Berlin

Wolf House, 1925-7, Guben

His background and

education similar to Le
Corbusiers, but his
neoclassical phase lasted 2
decades
In his 40s when he
completed his first ModernistConstructivist building

After the First World War he

met a circle of artists and
writers, including van
Doesburg and El Lissitzky
and was influenced by them

Early constructivist projects

progressively become
fragmented and articulated
so that the external form
reflects internal subdivision

This shows influences of the

English free-style house,
Berlage, and Wright but is
mainly immediately preceded
by De Stijl

Tugendhat House, Brno,1928-30

New stage in development

Brick is abandoned for render
painted white
Monolithic cubic mass, with a setback, fragmented upper floor
(where the street entrance is)
reminiscent of his neoclassical
projects
The living room enormous space
divided by fixed yet free-standing
screens
South and east fully glazed with
floor-to-ceiling plate-glass
windows
The cubic volume is clear but it is
made totally transparent
classical closure and the infinite
sublime combined by means of
modern technology

German Pavilion for the

Barcelona International
Exposition, 1929 (rebuilt
1986)
The enclosing cube is
gone and the entire space
defined through
independent horizontal
and vertical planes
The planes dont
disappear into infinity but
turn back on themselves
to form open courts
In both projects: the roof
supported by an
independent grid of
columns
Too slender to support the
roof and are helped by the
wall planes
They are signs marking
the modular grid, rather
than columns

Between 1931 and

1935 (and after
WW2) a series of
houses which adapt
the Barcelona
Pavilion plan-type to
domestic use; plans
increasingly
introverted
Nature still dominant
in his sketches the
house frames a view
in which nature is
idealised

Farnsworth House, 1946-50, Plano (IL)

Often assumed that the minimalist

distillation in Mies has to do with
commitment to the craft of building,
but he appears more engaged with
idealising and mediating
techniques of graphic
representation
His criteria ideal and visual to a
great degree not constructional
He uses materiality but in a
montage way
Miess conception of
architecture followed the
dialectic tendency of German
Idealism to think in terms of
opposites. According to the
Neoplatonic aesthetics that
influenced his thinking, the
transcendental world is reflected
in the world of the senses.
(Colquhoun)

Mies in America

The development of the

corporate office building
influenced by his work; at the
same time he stayed detached
from the needs of his clients
Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of
Technology, Chicago (1940-56)

Assemblage of rectangular
pavilions that conform to the
abstract conditions of the
American grid
Schinkel influence evident

Lake Shore Drive

Apartments, 1948-51,
Chicago

Miess American
projects provided the
formal syntax for
SOM and Saarinen

His approach: to perfect a

type that distils his quest for
the will of the epoch solution,
then he repeats it regardless
of the example

Use of I-beams in his curtainwall facades: first developed

in Lake Shore Drive

Ambiguous: can be read as

mullions or columns, bear
structural connotations but
are also decorative as they
are welded to the surface of
the pre-existing structure

He rejected Le Corbusiers
individualism but his minimal
forms are still rhetorical and
remnants of a high art
tradition

Seagram Building 1954-58, New York