Wide Range of Avant-Garde Techniques
This exhibit is a sprawling centennial look at arguably the most influential architect of 20th-century America. While Frank Lloyd Wright got the lion's share of publicity, Mies had the lion's share of influence on other architects, both as the last director of the Bauhaus, Germany's seminal modernist academy until the Nazis shut it down in 1933; and as the architect who then went on to change, for both better and worse, how America's cities look. The exhibition is divided between the two museums, with MoMA covering Mies in Berlin, and the Whitney covering Mies in America.
Although combined, the two exhibits present a staggering array of models, photographs, drawings, blueprints, furniture, videotapes, and computer animation, they are less successful in placing Mies into a social, historical, and political context.
Of the two, MoMA does a far better job of placing Mies into the heady framework of a Germany being buffeted by change, first from WWI, then by the decadent Weimar years, and finally by the darkness of Nazi rule.
Of the two exhibitions, MoMA's is also the more creative, if only because Mies was growing and changing so much as an artist, beginning from when he moved to Berlin in 1905. (In an ignominious beginning to a legendary career, he threw up on the train ride from his birthplace of Aachen to Berlin.)
Befitting an exhibition of an artist whose European career peaked near the end of the Weimar Republic, MoMA's exhibition displays a wide range of avant-garde techniques. There are digitally altered photographs, copies of G, (short for Gestaltung (“Organization”)), the avant-architecture magazine that Mies himself paid to issue during 1924, and videotapes of Mies's exhibition techniques. There also numerous building models, many of which were specially commissioned by MoMA for this event.
Corporate Headquarters
It also doesn't hurt that Mies's architectural style was evolving, searching, and generally more experimental while he was in Germany. The models and other material at MoMA chart Mies's conversion from a classical architect, inspired by 19th century Germany's great Karl Friedrich Shinkel, to the lean, Bauhaus and Corbusier-influenced modernist. The exhibit suggests that Mies began to shift towards his modernist mode based partially on anger at being rejected for a Bauhaus architectural demonstration by Walter Gropius. This began a lifelong feud with Gropius. The feud, sometimes playful, sometimes bitter, with the founder of the Bauhaus — a better teacher, but demonstrably inferior architect to Mies (just compare the blocky Pan-Am building to the sleek, classical Seagram) — ended only with Meis's warm eulogy to Gropius.
The MoMA portion of the exhibit has many of Mies's early works displayed in various formats, such as the Riehl House, which is shown by way of a model, photographs, and a computer-generated walk though. The creativity in displaying these early works lends extra interest to an exhibit that can be otherwise overwhelming in scope.
It does help to be slightly familiar with Mies's career before attending either exhibition, and Franz Schulze's biography of Mies, available in the gift shop of both museums, does an excellent job of placing Mies into a historical context. And at $28.00 for the softcover version, it's also a cheaper alternative to the mammoth $60 tomes each museum is selling to accompany their exhibition.
For anyone armed with a little background, both exhibitions also highlight a few of Mies's mistakes, misfires, lesser works, and quirky individual designs: the deadly dull form of his low-income housing project on the Afrikanichestrasse in Berlin of 1927; the fifty-by-fifty house of 1950-51, which Mies thought could be built en masse, Levittown style, despite the fact that it's almost all glass, and all open plan, except the bathrooms and closets; his unbuilt 1945-46 drive-through restaurant design; his 1926 monument to slain Communists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg; and finally, his 1934 designs for the German Pavilion for the Brussels World's Fair of 1935, in which Mies tried to make his own appeasement with the Nazis.
Eventually, of course, Mies could find little or no work in Nazi Germany and fled to Chicago. If Mies's architecture, and his politics bounced all over the spectrum in Berlin, they appear to be solidly capitalistic, and even conservative in America, where several of Mies's most important commissions were for corporate headquarters, and all of which are portrayed in some medium in the exhibit.
An Epoch Translated into Space
He became an American citizen in 1944 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. It's probably not a coincidence that the large collage that was created to demonstrate the interior of his enormous proposed Chicago Convention Center includes a photograph of thousands of conventioneers waving “I LIKE IKE!” signs.
This is the material covered by the Whitney, which does a mediocre job of placing the architect who once wrote, “Architecture is the will of an Epoch translated into space” into the epoch within which he operated, but an excellent job in displaying the second half of his life's work. Perhaps it's the fear of acknowledging that only in America, especially in the roaring economy of the 1950s, could Mies have found the clients that allowed him to build his best works, such as his magisterial Seagram building, the one modernist jewel on otherwise clunky and repetitive Park Ave.
In spite of the lack of an historical context, the Whitney's exhibit is certainly well laid out, spacious, and makes great use of subtle Ligeti-like background music — much more interesting than the hackneyed Beethoven Ken Burns used in his Frank Lloyd Wright documentary. Anyone who has an interest in Mies, or even in 20th-century architecture and design in the U.S. would do well to pay a visit.
And in a brilliant bit of symbolism, the Whitney displays a large-scale model of Berlin's new National Gallery, in a darkened room — the last building of the last surviving representative of “the heroic age of modernism.”
Exhibition Notes
Mies in Berlin is on view from June 21 through September 11, 2001 at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Mies in America is on view from June 21 through September 23, 2001 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Both exhibitions share an extensive website at www.moma.org.
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
