MIES VAN DER ROHE: FURNITURE AND INTERIORS
Werner Blaser
Werner Blaser: MIES VAN DER ROHE: FURNITURE AND INTERIORS. Woodbury, NY: Barron’s, 1982. First American edition. Square quarto. Black paper covered boards decorated in white. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 141 pp. 220 black and white illustrations. Black matte jacket lightly rubbed, tiny nick to lower edge of rear panel. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
9.75 x 9 hardcover book with 141 pages and 220 black and white photos and drawings. From the inside flap: “He was the father of the now ubiquitous glass skyscraper, director of the seminal Bauhaus School, evangelist of the International Style in architecture—in short Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was probably the single most influential architect of this century. Mies, who observed that only a living interior has a living exterior, believed furniture to be the first element in the architect’s organization of space. Correspondingly, this new volume in Barron’s Furniture and Design series focuses on Mies as a shaper of interior space, a classicist who could integrate furniture and architecture to produce a harmonious whole.”
- Preface
- Principles of Design
- Mies van der Rohe, 1886-1969
- The Significance of His Work
- Changing Form Through Technology
- Background for an Understanding of Mies’s Design: includes the sections “The Beginnings of Modernism”; “The Pioneers of Modern Design”; “The Avant-Garde,” and “Design and the Werkbund.”
- The Design of Mies van der Rohe, Furniture and Interiors: includes the sections: “Early Furniture in Wood and Steel,“ “Evolution of Skeleton Forms, 1925-1935,” “Early Tubular-Steel Furniture,” “The Weissenhof Development (Werkbund Exposition) in Stuttgart, 1927,” and “Form and Architecture, 1927.”
- Furniture Designs for Specific Buildings
- Spatial Studies/Interiors
- Realizations in Chicago: includes the sections “Museum for a Small City, 1942” and “Mies on Technology and Architecture.”
- Evolution of Form: includes the sections “Chair Forms Before and After 1940,” “Sketches for Bentwood Armchairs, 1933-35,” and “Shell-Shaped Creations, 1940-46.”
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) can be considered the father of the modern city, with its towers of glass and steel his ever growing progeny and legacy. 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.
Mies van der Rohe 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.