L'OEUVRE DE MIES VAN DER ROHE
André Bloc [Director], Alexandre Persitz and Danielle Valeix
André Bloc [Director], Alexandre Persitz and Danielle Valeix: L'OEUVRE DE MIES VAN DER ROHE. Boulogne, France: L’Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, 1958. First edition thus [originally published as a special issue of L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, September 1958]. Text in French with English texts to rear. Large octavo. Blue cloth stamped in white. Publishers clear plastic wrapper. Frontis portrait with facsimile signature. 103 pp. Fully illustrated articles and essays, with primarily black and white photography and a few color reproductions. Front endpapers faintly offset, otherwise a fine copy.
9.85 x 11.75 hardcover book with 103 pages devoted to the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, originally published as a special issue of the magazine L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui in September 1958. Includes English-language essays by Christian Norberg-Schulz, Reginald Malcomson, Peter Blake and Mies van der Rohe his own bad self.
Includes illustrated references to the Weissenhof Estate, Barcelona Pavilion, Villa Tugendhat, the Verseidag Factory, the Lemke House, the Farnsworth House, Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Master Plan, Academic Campus & Buildings, Chicago, Illinois, and many others.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe [Aachen, 1886 – 1969] is one of the most important architects of the twentieth century, commensurate in stature with Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. During an illustrious career which started in Germany at the beginning of the century and ended in Chicago in the sixties, Mies' consistently fundamentalist approach to architecture can be seen in the evoluation of his built work as well as in his contribution to architectural theory through his teaching. In recent years considerable attention has been focused on the later, International Style phase of the architect's work, with little information being available on the early part of Mies' career, especially the period preceding the Bauhaus.
Miesbegan his career in architecture in Berlin, working as an architect first in the studio of Bruno Paul and then, like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, for Peter Behrens. In 1927, a housing project called Weissenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart, Germany, would bring these names together again. Widely believed to be one of the most notable projects in the history of modern architecture, it includes buildings by Gropius, Corbu, Behrens, Mies and others.
“Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form.”
In 1928, Mies and his companion and colleague, the designer and Bauhaus alumna Lilly Reich, were asked to design the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. The purpose of the Pavilion was to provide a location that could be visited by the king and queen of Spain during the opening of the Exposition. With that in mind, Mies designed a modern throne – known today as the Barcelona® Chair – for their majesties. In the following year, Mies designed another notable chair, the Brno, with a gravity-defying cantilevered base.
“Instead of trying to solve the new problems with old forms, we should develop the now forms from the very nature of the new problems.”
In 1930, Mies succeeded Walter Gropius as the director of the Bauhaus, where he stayed until the school closed in 1933. In 1937, Mies emigrated from Europe to the United States, and a year later became the director of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The rest of his career was devoted to promoting the modernist style of architecture in the U.S., resulting in rigorously modern buildings such as the Farnsworth House and the Seagram Building, designed with Philip Johnson.
"Reinforced concrete structures are skeletons by nature. No gingerbread. No fortress. Columns and girders eliminate vearing walls. This is skin and bone construction”.
The modern city, with its towers of glass and steel, can be at least in part attributed to the influence of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Equally significant, if smaller in scale, is Mies’ daring design of furniture, pieces that exhibit an unerring sense of proportion, as well as minimalist forms and exquisitely refined details. In fact, his chairs have been called architecture in miniature – exercises in structure and materials that achieve an extraordinary visual harmony as autonomous pieces and in relation to the interiors for which they were designed.