![]() Mies illustration ![]() Mies circa 1950 ![]() Seagram Building model 1954 ![]() Seagram Building first floor plan 1955-58 ![]() Seagram Building under construction circa 1957 ![]() Seagram Building 1955-58 ![]() Seagram Building 1954-58 ![]() Gene Summers and Mies working on Seagram Building circa 1956 ![]() Mies in S.R. Crown Hall circa 1955 ![]() Crown Hall steps 1956 ![]() Four Seasons Restaurant 1955-58 ![]() Four Seasons Restaurant 1955-58 ![]() Layayette Park single-story townhome and hi-rise pavilion 1955-63 ![]() Lafayette Park townhouses Detroit 1959 ![]() Battery Park Apartments rendering 1957 ![]() Bacardi Mexico City interior 1957-61 ![]() 2400 Lakeview Avenue 1959-63 ![]() Chicago Federal Center Dirkson Building 1959-64 ![]() Chicago Federal Center 1959-74 ![]() Chicago Federal Center 1959-73 ![]() Chicago Federal Center one-story courtroom ![]() Schaefer Museum model 1960 ![]() New National Gallery model showing lower galleries 1962-68 ![]() Toronto-Dominion Banking Pavilion 1963-69 ![]() Toronto-Dominion Banking Pavilion 1963-69 ![]() IBM Plaza Chicago 1966-72 ![]() Westmount Square aerial view 1964-67 ![]() New National Gallery model 1967 ![]() Mansion House Square London model circa 1968 ![]() Mansion House Square London model circa 1968 ![]() Barcelona Pavilion interior ![]() Barcelona/Tugendhat/Reich grouping circa 2015 ![]() 880 (left) and 860 (right) Lake Shore Drive circa 2016 |
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) History Less is more. 1954 turned out to be as important to Mies as the year he came to America in 1938. He was comfortably ensconced in IIT and had begun building the neighboring residential skyscrapers to his landmark Chicago buildings of 860/880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Few architects achieve lasting fame with one building but his next project in New York City would land in the history books and propel his name to the pantheon of the world’s greatest artists. Seagram Building In 1954, the daughter of Seagram Distilleries’ CEO, Samuel Bronfman, received her father’s letter in Paris enclosing a photograph of the designer, Charles Luckman, proudly posing with a hulking model for a headquarters building Bronfman had planned to build on New York’s Park Avenue. Horrified at its clunkiness for such a prominent site, the daughter, Phyllis Lambert, a sculptor studying in a French art school, persuaded her father to let her choose a better architect.
In 1955, Mies and structural engineer Fred Severud began to build a 39-story five-bay-wide bronze tower set 90 feet back from the front lot-line of the previously unbroken stone and brick cliffs comprising Park Avenue. The break in the wall of the more traditional buildings – and unlike the “wedding cake” massing of contemporary construction in the 1950s – made Seagram seem (in the 2001 words of Phyllis Lambert) “...like an unprecedented opening in the city’s fabric.” His usual steel was reserved for the skeleton but Mies had secured enough bronze for the curtainwalls to fill a large museum with sculptures. His plan from the start (as was Lambert’s) was to make the building into a kind of monument. However, to shave the building into a thin slab, he performed an optical trick by recessing the tower’s back portion into a stiffening “spine” of only three windowed structural bays wide and one opaque bay of 27-foot-nine-inches deep seen only from its side views on 52nd and 53rd Streets. He also clothed the spine’s North and South walls of diagonal steel braces in 38 floors of dark green Serpentine marble. This made the tower’s plan into a “T” shape unlike the box-like skyscrapers going up in the next few years.
To otherwise increase its rentable floorspace, a ten-story “bustle” whose bottom five floors stretched to both side street lot-lines is attached to its eastern backside. It held the Four Seasons restaurant and bar on its plaza level and office square footage less dependent on window space above that. The bustle’s top five floors are recessed by one bay on each end. The tower and its bustle sit on a pink Swenson granite podium with two reflecting pools edged by long benches of Antico Verde marble flanking the entrance approach from Park Avenue. The steel was noisily riveted at the factory but its assembled larger segments were quietly bolted together on the site. Like the construction of Chicago’s 860/880 buildings, the New York fire code required encasing the vertical columns of a multi-story steel skeleton in concrete jackets. However, in order to emphasize the metallic nature of its supporting structure – and similar to the Chicago residential towers – Mies pre-wrapped the concrete-covered corners in metal plates instead of wooden formwork. And like the Esplanade of 1953-55, he hung a curtainwall of floor-to-ceiling topaz gray plate glass, flat metal soffits, and applied “I” beam mullions.
Because the tower was mostly see-through, its interior was as important to Mies as its exterior. Johnson showcased the building’s nighttime lantern-like appearance with 11½ feet of wall-to-wall “luminous” light panels in the ceiling all the way from the hallways to the windows. Its uniformity during the day was emphasized with the installation of venetian blinds with three stops showing them either totally closed, halfway up, or completely open.
It proved an aesthetic disaster. Despite New York’s next crop of windswept and barren open spaces surrounding blank, faceless towers, the approach became the new look of the corporate world. Every city now has “poor-man’s-Mies” structures sitting in endless concrete paved plazas ruining downtowns globally.
Lafayette Park In 1949, the Fair Housing Act provided funds for “slum clearance” and Detroit wasted no time in bulldozing its Black Bottom neighborhood near downtown. When the initial mixed-income plan of dozens of towers designed by Minoru Yamasaki collapsed, Herbert Greenwald and Mies (who brought in his Bauhaus/IIT compatriot, Ludwig Hilberseimer) stepped in by 1955 to outline a more middle-class income (read White) project there.
Colonnade Park Newark, New Jersey, also redeveloped the site of the low-income Christopher Columbus Homes into the middle-income Colonnade Park, a set of three concrete cage, aluminum curtainwall 21-story high-rises developed in 1958 as Mies’ last completed project with Herbert Greenwald. Joseph Fujikawa was put in charge of the design for the entire project. The two high-rises toward the east were renamed “Pavilion Towers” and set in parkland on its east and a parking lot to the west. But the enormous, twin lobby “Colonnade Apartments” overlooks the Olmsted Brothers’ 1895-designed Branch Brook Park within Newark’s most historic area.
Had the 1934 Brussels Pavilion at 729.6-feet-square or the 1954 Chicago Convention Hall at 720-feet-square been built, they would have resulted in the largest Mies van der Rohe buildings. But the Colonnade Apartments at 446x66-feet is certainly the longest of all Mies built structures and its lengthy rows of concrete legs were painted white (unlike the gray painted Pavilion supports). Its central hallway spine would have been dizzyingly long had it not been blocked halfway by a fire stair. Bacardi Office Buildings The chairman of the Bacardi Rum Corporation, José Bosch, found Chicago’s Crown Hall to be in sync with his thinking and in 1957 had commissioned Mies to design the company’s headquarters building in a similar look in its 1862 birthplace of Santiago de Cuba. But it wasn’t the first time the company had depended on architecture to promote “sophistication” in its brand, employing Neo-Classicism for its 1928 Santiago museum and Art Déco for its 1930 Havana office building.
As New York’s Seagram Building and its steel construction was in the news nearly daily, Bosch may have been pleased that Mies’ design was the exact opposite of his competition in presenting a whitish concrete canopy-like structure supported by two tapering columns per side over one recessed glass enclosed story that was more akin to his 1929 Barcelona Pavilion. Ironically, though Bosch had supported the revolution, the new Castro regime had nationalized all of Bacardi’s Cuban assets and buildings just as the company was constructing a new Mies regional headquarters outside of Mexico City. Since a Santiago structure was no longer viable, its design was filed away for future use and the suburban Mexico City building became the new administrative offices of the entire brand until 1965.
Designed and built from 1957 to 1961 and situated just down and off a major highway, the 52-meter-long one-story Bacardi Mexico City building of black steel on 24 “H” beam columns sitting on a Mexican travertine base was literally elevated one level to keep the roof plane from being so visible to approaching cars. The entry into a double-height, glass-walled room on the platform is marked by two opposing floating staircases leading up to the principal floor. The open plan envisioned by Bosch as leading to more crosscurrents of thought, devolved into petty administrative secrecy by moving decision-making into hidden corners behind mahogany dividing walls. Federal Center In 1959, Mies had been awarded the opportunity to take the lead in the design (along with three other firms) of the new federal complex in downtown Chicago. He and office architect Gene Summers designed a group of buildings to replace a single domed granite and marble federal courthouse that had presided over its site at Dearborn and Adams since the turn of the 20th century. In the program were three separate buildings: a 368-foot-long courthouse slab of 30 stories on the east side of Dearborn, and on the site itself, an office tower of 42 stories, a single-story post office building and open plaza that were constructed over a number of years.
After the remnants of Cobb’s courthouse were cleared away, construction commenced on the 42-story office building on the south end of the now open site. Both high-rises utilized concrete fireproofing on their steel girder frames with curtainwalls of gray/black steel and the same topaz gray plate glass he used in New York’s Seagram Building. The elevator banks were faced with the same dark gray granite as the lobby floors and plaza appearing both judicially sober and somewhat somber in the cold, overhead lighting. As the office building reached its upper limits, the one-story post office of 197-feet-square was built to the north and both were finished in 1974. Though it used the same 4-foot-8-inch module of the skyscrapers (apparent by the joints in the Rockville granite floors, sidewalk, and outdoor plaza), its structural bay dimension of 65-feet-4-inches is far bigger than the skyscrapers’ of 28-feet-square.
Perhaps the most astonishing visual is Alexander Calder’s shocking vermillion 53-foot stabile, “Flamingo,” appearing to walk on the outdoor plaza beneath the black skyscrapers. Obviously, built of riveted and welded steel and incongruously biomorphic against a backdrop of cool Miesian mathematics, this 1973-74 sculpture was the first artwork commissioned by the GSA (clients of the Federal Center itself) for the “Percent for Art” program.
Toronto-Dominion Centre However, a few projects interested him enough to give the jobs his full attention. What at first glance strongly resembles Chicago’s Federal Center with a single-story pavilion at the feet of two skyscrapers, was built, instead, for commercial as opposed to governmental purposes. Because one of the clients, Toronto-Dominion Bank, had partnered with the giant Fairview real estate firm, the complex was probably destined to be a “money machine” from the start. Phyllis Lambert, the Director of Planning and proxy client for New York’s Seagram Building was also born a Bronfman, the owners of Fairview real estate. After SOM’s Gordon Bunshaft produced a rejected design of a 60-story tapered concrete tower incorporating the bigger retail banking floor on the bottom, Lambert steered Mies van der Rohe toward the commission as lead architect with two other firms in 1963. Mies then made his office employee, Peter Carter, the Project Architect.
Placing a bigger banking facility apart from the skyscrapers was a particular Mies method to avoid the compromise of both functions. As to the towers: by now, the Mies structural system of a metal curtainwall and corner wrapping of the fireproofed or totally concrete skeleton for high-rises was the norm since 1953 and the construction of Chicago’s Esplanade Apartments. This time, however, encasing steel skeletons by a layer of concrete like Chicago’s 860/880 and Federal Center towers wasn’t a necessary step.
The original Toronto-Dominion Centre opened in 1967-68-69 (respectively as the buildings opened) while four new non-Mies skyscrapers have been built over the years making it a six-tower complex. Its construction was a refinement of Mies’ building methods for clear-span (banking pavilion) and high-rise (office towers) structures but it also ignited a building war of sorts between rival banks that turned Toronto’s skyline into an increasingly tall forest of skyscrapers. Westmount Square Mies’ idea for a “superblock” of mixed uses incorporating residences, stores, restaurants, and offices was finally proposed in 1964 but looks to have been disruptively placed. Inserted into a leafy, low-rise portion of Montreal two miles from downtown, the development of three black 21-story high-rises on 5-foot-3-inch-square travertine pavers atop three levels of parking and an imposing three-level black anodized aluminum covered office structure definitely changed the character of the bucolic, upscale suburb.
The developer adhered to a marketing survey and Westmount’s zoning allowance that built on the 3.56-acre site to open in 1967. But that zoning may have been influenced by resident Samuel Bronfman, the head of Seagram distilleries (Mies’ client for the Seagram Building in New York) and principal funder of Westmount Square. The affluent suburb had been a leading English-speaking thorn in the side of French-speaking City of Montreal for decades. However, the separate town of Westmount had been annexed to the larger city in a “mega-merger” of the surrounding 27 towns and their suburbs in 2002. But when the recalcitrant merged cities then decoupled from Montreal in 2006, it left Westmount to again revert to an independent civic structure that, despite the development of other big city high-rises, had here and there retained its 1890s look of small-town charm. Of course, Mies (and his affiliated architects) cannot be blamed for the massive puncture in the suburb’s fabric. That distinction can be laid at the feet of the developers and zoning board. But the power of architecture proves that its very size can alter everything around it and the Westmount Square project is “Exhibit A” in that delicate balance. Mansion House Square This unbuilt London financial district design of 1967 seemed to appeal to Mies, like those who commented on its proposal in 1968, to be primarily a way to open up the dense urban area. Underneath the eight-acre site of Victorian buildings constructed on an ancient duke’s land was a “tube” stop at an unmoving diagonal angle.
Mies directed Englishman Peter Carter to be project architect. The client, Lord Rudolph Palumbo (father of Peter, who would later buy Mies’ Farnsworth House from Edith Farnsworth in 1972), wanted to replace the 1870 Neo-Gothic Victorian building with a modernist tower and add plantings of trees and benches to both blocks. To justify the money spent, a 20-story steel cage high-rise was to house the offices of Lloyds Bank. And like a miniature Seagram Building, it was to have a curtainwall of bronze metal and gray glass.
What the ultimate winner of the site lacked in height, it more than made up for in colorful flamboyance. Perhaps the last “Postmodern” structure, a horizontally striped pink and yellow limestone with angled green glass office building, Number 1 Poultry was finally constructed there in the mid-1990s. Started in 1985 and completed in 1997, James Stirling’s seven-story structure was built by Rudolph’s son, Lord Peter Palumbo. And its rooftop restaurant ascended to a mere 80 feet. Ironically, the nearby “City” financial district has since grown with numerous skyscrapers likened to juke boxes, cheese graters, walkie-talkies, and pickles more than three times the height of Mies van der Rohe’s only London design. New National Gallery Considered by Mies to be his final building, it was fitting, perhaps, that this museum was built in Berlin where the architect began his career. Despite Mies’ longtime assertion that “form” was only the result of the design program and not the objective for architecture, ever since the unbuilt Cuban Bacardi building and its hovering plane overhanging a glazed recess sat in an office drawer, he’d thought it would make a fine museum.
Applying the identical building form in 1962, Mies designed a simple structure in steel, albeit to gigantic proportions (5,000 square meters or 53,820 square feet). But unlike the Bacardi Building’s hovering roof of concrete, the uniform steel grid of ceiling/roof of the Berlin building was totally flat and left exposed covered only in crisp black aluminum.
The main hall is paved in a polished gray granite and to prevent slight sagging of the 60-foot corners of the roof, each was designed to extend five centimeters higher than the edge centers. Cambers on top of the corners and in the middle of the entire roof deflected slight deformation when finished and the total hovering plane appears totally flat.
The museum, only a part of a gigantic Kulturforum of diverse galleries, symphony halls, and a library opened in 1968 in what was then West Berlin. But Mies’ almost over-powering pavilion tells today’s architectural historians that looking at the building from afar can be almost more important than looking out from inside. Decline Mies died of esophageal cancer on August 17th, 1969. Many years of cigar smoking were most likely the cause but Mies had been debilitated by severe arthritis for at least ten years and rarely left his wheelchair in all the time that followed.
Two months after the families’ small service at Graceland Cemetery’s chapel and where he would forever lie, a bigger gathering comprising dozens of students and friends assembled at IIT’s Crown Hall to listen to tributes and the same Bach-playing cellist. Legacy For someone to embroider a new name for himself at 35 (late for an artist) and care more for exhibitions than architectural clients, it’s obvious he was trying to prove a point. Similarly, in the final edit of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe film, his early vernacular houses that may have taught him how to build were left on the cutting room floor. Though he rarely acknowledged the houses, it is his modernist buildings he would be remembered for that are “dateless” and certainly speak with the loudest voice anyway.
Of course, seeing beauty in structure goes back to before the Chicago School of Architecture; the earlier ship-building techniques of medieval half-timber constructions; even the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. However, Mies brought it into the 20th century. His persistence on using that simple concept for his own buildings is why his modernist structures were the nucleus of the “Second Chicago School of Architecture.” Some critics have said his modernist works were too cold and austere and weren’t symbolic of the house or office or school. But they were certainly symbols of their “epoch” as he had always taught since his first studies of Germany’s medieval buildings.
And more than a few of his students, when confronted with Mies’ black palette, have said, “Well, the people provide the color and chaos.” Although, this may not be true regarding his results as Mies operated with an architectural grid behind his eyes and designed his world to live up to it. The industrial age Mies lived in, with its endless parallel tracks in mathematical railway yards and steel factories untouched by an aesthetic hand, were bound to be seen through the lens of an artist. The applied “I” beams and inside-out steel architecture were merely his abstraction of the “design free” construction of massive rail yards and coke ovens around him.
Actually, the historian is hard-pressed to find much that he has written and his verbal Bauhaus and IIT teaching will forever remain transitory, live performances only. Like all acting coaches, painting instructors, and creative writing classes teach, this is the essence of most good art. Much like traditional Japanese building, fewer components were always better than many to Mies. He may have reputedly first heard the phrase “Less is More” over his shoulder while at the drafting board in 1909 by his architect boss but it was always percolating in his brain.
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