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 Gropius’s 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 L’Esprit Nouveau

• This initiated by van Doesburg’s 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 Gropius’s earlier work

Bauhaus Dessau, Director’s 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 north-south

• 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 Corbusier’s, but his neoclassical phase lasted 2 decades

• In his 40s when he completed his first Modernist-Constructivist 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 set-

back, 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 don’t 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

• ‘Mies’s 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

Mies’s 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 curtain-wall 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 Corbusier’s ‘individualism’ but his minimal forms are still rhetorical and remnants of a high art tradition

• Seagram Building 1954-58, New York