La CASA BELLA
[Rivista Mensile] Novembre 1931
L’Architetto Van Der Rohe
Guido Marangoni [Director]: La CASA BELLA [Rivista Mensile]. Milan: Studio Editoriale Milanese, 1931. Original edition [Anno N. 47, novembre 1931]. Text in Italian. Slim quarto. Perfect bound printed wrappers over side stapled textblock. [82] pp. Illustrated articles and period advertisments. One color plate. Multiple paper stocks. Wrappers uniformly rubbed and lightly soiled, but a very good copy.
9.75 x 12.75 side stapled magazine with 82 pages of illustrated articles and period advertisments. Casabella magazine (est. 1928) is an Italian periodical that has been informing and educating its readership about the design, architectural, and aesthetics trends of the time while framing them within their broader cultural environment.
Contents include:
- L’Architetto Van Der Rohe. Ten pages with 9 photographs and 3 drawings of the recently completed Tugendhat House in Brnö, Czechoslavakia. One of the earliest and most most extensive editorial documentations of this residential masterpiece.
- La Mostra Coloniale a Roma. Four pages with 8 photographs of Colonial Buildings and the Exhibition (Architect Alessandro Limongelli).
- Architettura Moderna di Venti Secoli Fa. G. Pagano-Pogatschnig: Six pages with 11 photographs on the modernity of the architecture of Pompeii.
- Pittura Moderna di Venti Secoli Fa. Giorgio Nicodemi: Six pages with 12 photographs of the frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries.
- Gigi Chessa. One page essay with color axiometric plate of a childrens’ room.
- Guida All’Arredamento Moderno. Furniture Guide: Seven pages with 14 photographs of furnished interiors by Franco Albini, Oscar Ortelli, Michele Merighi, Studio Primavera in Paris, etc.
- Tende et Endine. Lidia Morelli on curtains designed by Fausto Melotti. Three pages and 2 drawings.
- Ceamiche Lenci. Three pages with three photographs by Lenci.
- Contemporary German Art. Five pages with 6 reproductions of artwork by Jankel Adler, Xaver Fuhr, Georg Grosz, and Karl Hofer.
“The Villa Tugendhat was commissioned by the wealthy newlyweds Grete & Fritz Tugendhat, a Jewish couple with family money from textile manufacturing companies in Brno. The couple met Mies van der Rohe in Berlin in 1927, and was already impressed by his design for the Zehlendorf house of Edward Fuchs. As fans of spacious homes with simple forms, Mies’ free plan method was perfect for the Tugendhats’ taste; however, he was not their only interest in an architect for their own home. They originally confronted Brno’s foremost modern architect at the time, Arnost Wiesner, but after visiting various projects by each architect, the Tugendhats ultimately went with Mies.
“Mies visited the site in September of 1928, and had already produced plans by December of that same year. He shared his design with the Tugendhat family that new year’s eve, and with a few minor changes new plans were drafted and set into motion. Mies deployed his new functionalist concept of iron framework, doing away with load-bearing interior walls and allowing for more open and light spaces. The villa was composed of three levels (including the basement), with different floor plans and forms, each relating differently to the sloping site.
“The Southeast and garden facades were completely glazing from floor to ceiling. The villa Tugendhat was a rather large house, complete with two children’s bedrooms and nanny’s quarters that shared a bathroom at the front of the house, while the master bed and bath were at the rear and connected to the terrace. A housekeeper’s flat and staff quarters were also included in the design.
“The villa was exceptionally expensive for its time considering the lavish materials, abnormal construction methods, and extraordinary new technologies of heating and cooling. The house was very advanced for a private residence, and while the overall cost was never known, estimates fall somewhere near five million Czech crowns. Brno was already a hub of modern Architecture for Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, and the Villa Tugendhat was only met with moderate praise at best among the avant garde in its time. Many of the left wing elite in the art world viewed the new home as snobbish and overdone because its lush interior design and furnishings.
“Mies designed all the furniture in the house and chose precisely the placement of each piece and fixture. Although there was no art on the walls or decoration in or on the house, it never came across as bare or plain because of the rich materiality of onyx and rare tropical woods used throughout the home. The villa was built by building contractors in Brno, but the iron framework was constructed by contractors from Berlin.
“Steel frame construction was unusual for homes at that time, but brought with it many advantages that Mies was very occupied with and had already used in his famed Barcelona Pavilion – thinner walls, a free plan that could differ from floor to floor, large walls of glazing to open up rooms and connect them to the garden, etc. Over all the minimal and stable design became a hallmark in Mies’ residential accomplishments.
“The Tugendhat family left Czechoslovakia for Venezuela in 1938 shortly before The Munich Agreement and never returned. The Gestapo set up flats and offices in the abandoned house during the World War II, when most of the windows were blown out during air raids and the original furniture was eventually all stolen. The villa was used in 1992 for the formal signing that separated the country into the present day Czech Republic and Slovakia, and since 1994 has been open to the public as a museum. Heirs of Fritz and Grete Tugendhat filed for the reinstitution of the villa into their ownership in 2007 on the basis of laws in place regarding works of art confiscated during the Holocaust.” — Jules Gianakos
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe [1886 – 1969] began 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.
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.
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.
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.
Guido Marangoni established La Casa Bella (or “The Beautiful House”) in Milan in 1928, at a time when such design-focused publications were starting to become popular. La Casa Bella rapidly developed a solid readership as the more-affluent and educated Italian urban populations pursued new aesthetics and cultural pursuits, and by its strong editorial quality. In 1933, famed Italian architects, designers, and design critics Giuseppe Pagano and Edoardo Persico managed the magazine, and strengthen its editorial reputation while allowing it to continue to be a source of modern design inspiration. They also decided to truncate the name to Casabella. The identity of the publication continued to shift, and it was published under the various titled Casabella Costruzioni (1938 – 40), Costruzioni Casabella (1940 – 43), Costruzioni (1946 – 47), Casabella continuità (1954 – 65), until finally returning to Casabella in August 1965. There were also several periods in which publication was halted by the Italian ministry of popular culture (1943 – 45; 1947 – 53). In January 1977, Gruppo Editoriale Electa took over the magazine, and since 1966 it has been published by Mondadori Editore, in an edition of some 47,000 copies monthly.