WEST MEETS EAST — MIES VAN DER ROHE
Werner Blaser
Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2001. Second, enlarged edition. Square quarto. Photo illustrated paper covered boards with Gray quarter cloth. 135 pp. Fully illustrated in black and white. Lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy.
10 x 10.25 hardcover book with 135 pages fully illustrated in black and white. Includes an essay by Johannes Malms. This fascinating work looks at the traditional architecture of China and Japan and the structures of Mies van der Rohe, one of the great masters of Modernism, uncovering the extraordinary parallels between them. Richly illustrated with impressive photographs, the book shows how architectonic wisdom and sensitivity can transcend borders, creating an architecture of harmony.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe reigns as one of the most richly complex figures in architecture's pantheon of classical modernists. Buildings such as his Barcelona Pavilion and New York City's Seagram Building have become 20th century landmarks and prototypes for building in the West. And yet a special feature of Mies van der Rohe's work has escaped attention to date: its remarkable concordance with traditional architecture of China and Japan.
Werner Blaser and Johannes Malms' study sets free these hidden connections between West and East. Malms' penetrating text uncovers striking parallels between Far Eastern philosophy and Mies' style of thinking and working. Werner Blaser's photographs make structural similarities underlying Mies' classical modern architecture and Eastern building traditions come into focus.
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.