Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper

– Niall Hobhouse

The ‘skyscraper’ was conceived in Minnesota in 1871; its designer, LeRoy Buffington, described it in the patent he registered seventeen years later: ‘as a building having a continuous skeleton of metal, a covering of veneer, and a non-conducting packing between the skeleton and veneer.’ His innovation—which he struggled to defend in court for many years afterwards—was to address the expansion and contraction of large steel structures under extremes of temperature, and in the method of cross-bracing against the elevator core.

In 1922, in Berlin, the young Mies takes the ‘veneer’ to its conceptual extreme; ‘an architecture of skin and bones,’ as he put it. To make the Wilhelmine houses clustered around the base of the model, he employed the set-fabricators from Nosferatu, and ‘soon realised that using glass does not achieve an effect of light or shadow, but rather becomes a great game of reflected light’. This copy of the famous collage was dedicated to Behrens, his former mentor and employer, ‘with great admiration’.

Excerpted from a longer article first published as ‘Skyscrapers on Paper’ in Vertical Urbanism (2024).