Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The drawings archive held by Mies at the time of his death was placed in the Museum of Modern Art, and his correspondence and papers at the Library of Congress. They constitute a comprehensive record of his works after the opening of his practice in the United States, especially for the postwar era. He had, however, left Berlin hastily, and except for a few significant projects—notably the Tugendhat house—the surviving record of his work in the archive is often incomplete. Several office files in Berlin were entrusted to students and colleagues from whose collections and estates a number of pieces—largely photo documentation—has appeared from time to time, often helping to complete the record.
At the same time, Mies’ highly instructive notebook, studio, and teaching sketches were frequently gifted to or gathered by students and associates throughout his time in Chicago, notably passing to James Speyer and Edward Duckett. Works from these sources have enriched public collections throughout the world with material that can work both in complement with the archive at MoMA and with each other—and sheets that entered private collections through the art market are gradually entering the public realm through re-sale and donation, such as those in the Zimmerman collection at MIT.
With material derived from both German and US sources, the Mies collection at Drawing Matter constitutes a small but highly instructive corpus opening up the range of his inquiry through model and drawing.
ON MIES VAN DER ROHE AND HIS APPROACH TO DRAWING, READ HERE 18 TEXTS, PUBLISHED ON DRAWING MATTER SINCE 2011.
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MODEL FOR THE KRÖLLER-MÜLLER HOUSE: SIX PHOTOGRAPHIC VIEWS, 1912
The project to house the family and art collection of the Kröller-Müller’s had passed at their request from Peter Behrens to his assistant Mies, looking for a simple and less monumental design to what Behrens had proposed. The commission effectively opened Mies’ practice. The photos in two 5cm strips of work prints from the negatives show Mies’ proposal as he presented it in a table model constructed in plaster; seen here from six different viewpoints. A full-size demonstration model of this scheme was built from this miniature, on the Ellenwoude site in Wassenaar, using wood and sailcloth. This design was rejected; the project passed first to H.P. Berlage for a more compact project, modelled at full-scale on the same site in 1915; then in 1918 to Berlage; and eventually Henry van de Velde for a ‘grand museum’ on a new site on the river Veluwe. Velde’s project was fully developed in a design of 1926 but only finally realised at a much smaller scale in 1938, as the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller. Throughout this saga, the Mies model was a grounding idea and aesthetic reference point for the subsequent designs. The museum archive holds perspective renderings of the scheme and photography of the built model, but the Drawing Matter group provides more extensive photo documentation of the Mies table model.
PHOTOGRAPHIC PROJECT DOCUMENTATION, 1922-33
A miscellaneous collection of original photographic documentation largely gathered from Mies’ studio by his associates at the time of his departure for the US and dispersed in recent years. It represents the range of his proposals for the public sphere for the decade ending 1933, translating the hypothetical dialectic on urban forms into actual propositions for design.
GLASS SKYSCRAPER, 1922
Of particular note are two examples of the numerous extant presentation photomontages by Curt Rehbein—in various archives—of the model for this hypothetical scheme, showing what is probably the same model seen in different orientations. Both collages incorporate settings by the artist Oskar Herzog, principally of fragments of the townscape from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
One is a glass plate negative with a forested landscape added as background. The other is a large print enlarged from a smaller original (now in the MoMA archives), which uses slight, bright gouache highlights to emphasise refraction. This print is inscribed by Mies to Peter Behrens and was published in the short-lived expressionist journal Fruhlicht. Later, it would be blown up to room height as a panel introducing Mies’ first monographic exhibition at MoMA in September 1947. The model appears again, from yet another viewpoint, in a photographic print presenting it as an assemblage of models for iconic examples of the ‘Neues Bauen’ movement. Possibly for Mies’ article on the subject in the Berliner Börsenkurier (1928), shown alongside Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s Chicago Tribune submission.
MODELS OF THE WEISSENHOFSEIDLUNG, STUTTGART, 1926-1927
Mies was entrusted by the Deutsche Werkbund with the programme and plan of the Weissenhof demonstration housing estate. This group of photographic documentation shows three evolving models from 1926-27. Four views of an early massing study, in which the elements cluster in a contiguous low-rise ensemble; one view of an intermediate model in which the housing colony is at varied heights on a more dispersed plan; and seven views of the final detailed model, in which the components are fully rendered. Included is one of the posters showing the model, used to advertise the exposition and a final aerial view of the site approaching completion. A slender file of complementary works for the master plan at MoMA includes an elevation.
STUTTGART BANK AND OFFICE BUILDING COMPETITION, 1928
A small-scale publication print of a large-scale photomontage (now in the MoMA archive, along with project elevations and sections from which this derives) contextualising a prominent corner of Mies’ proposal, on a site adjacent to the new railway station, within the vista from Hindenburgplatz.
ALEXANDERPLATZ BERLIN, PROTOTYPE CITY PLAN, 1928
A photomontage imposes Mies’ drawing on an aerial view of the urban fabric, showing his hypothetical proposal for mixed residential and commercial blocks. They are projected on the roadways and circles of Martin Wagner’s new city plan. It was published in Die Form by Alfred Rading and subsequently widely discussed at CIAM Brussels. In the reflections that followed, they approached urban redevelopment in contradistinction to the visionary cities of Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra. The file also includes a photograph of a model by Wagner himself for a more compact and conventional scheme for the same section of the city, numerous views of which also appear in collections of the CCA and the Berlin Senate.
BARCELONA PAVILION, 1929
Photograph by the Berliner Bild-Bericht agency for the office of Mies van der Rohe in 1929.
NEUE WACHE, 1930
Photo of a rendering of Mies’ proposal for the adaptation of the interior of the Neue Wache in Berlin into a cenotaph (the original artist’s rendering was lost). It is a competition for which Drawing Matter also holds studies of Hans Poelzig, but the Prussian government awarded the commission to Tessenow. There is a considerable body of Mies’ sketch studies for the project at MoMA.
GERMAN BUILDING EXHIBITION, BERLIN, 1931
Mies’ montage shows his conception of the temporary pavilions, model houses, and other structures as they were to be in the bow truss hall. It includes a small ‘court-house’, a seminal project with a small file of complementary studies in the MoMA archive. It’s accompanied by a photograph of the empty hall taken before installation.
REICHSBANK EXTENSION, 1933
Print of a perspective view from the River Spree of Mies’ competition entry—in the form of three matching tower blocks with ribbon windows.
HUBBE HOUSE: PRESENTATION DRAWINGS AND STUDY SKETCH, 1935
Mies had been developing the idea of a low-slung villa in which indoor and outdoor spaces intersect since his exercises in reinforced concrete of 1923. The large and long-gestating corpus of investigations that resulted was often in sketch form. Some develop his inquiry with others illustrating the fundamentals of space, line, vista, and juncture, but equally transparent to students, first at the Bauhaus and then at IIT. In 1947, Philip Johnson classified the idea of the ‘court-house’. The first of these sketches to take definite form was a villa, never built, for Margarete Hubbe in Magdeburg. It generated extensive studies first, developed in Berlin, and then extended its lessons in Chicago.
As his future in Berlin became uncertain, Mies gathered a portfolio of photostats of presentation studies for the Hubbe house, consisting of four ruled perspective sketches and a finished plan, to send to Clemens Holzmeister as he solicited a teaching post in Vienna. They constitute a unique record of the project, showing how Mies wished it to be seen.
An interior perspective study is one of many Hubbe and ‘court-house’ sketches that passed from Mies to his student and friend, James Speyer, but then on to numerous collections, with the most substantial bodies at the Deutsches Architektur Museum and Art Institute of Chicago. This example, in pen and ink, on a relatively large sheet of drawing paper, is rare among the more finished studies that seem stylistically to date from the development of the design.
MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOK SKETCHES, 1941-47
Two rapidly drawn conceptual perspectives of entire structures in profile, in soft pencil on small sheets of notepaper, from the Speyer estate. They show Mies examining—and perhaps demonstrating for students—approaches to space, line, and conjunction for projects dating from his first years at the Illinois Institute of Technology. One drawing for a long horizontal three-tiered scheme is similar to the well-known early study of the IIT library and administration building. The other one is of a high-rise of twenty bays and 15 floors—perhaps an early study either for the IIT dormitory or for the front of Chicago’s Promontory Apartments—in which the anchoring of the vertical members to the roof is the principal subject.
SPECIFICATION SHEETS FOR THE BARCELONA CHAIR AND STOOL, c.1960
Three sheets of elevation, section, and assembly details prepared to accompany the design license submitted to Mies’ former student, Florence Knoll; the designs originally developed with Lilly Reich for the Barcelona pavilion. The chair, in chrome-plated sections, had entered limited production in Europe from 1930 to 1934 with different manufacturers but was revived with Titlegratz of New York from 1945 to 1947. Then later, with Knoll as they obtained the full license to Mies designs in 1953. These drawings, deriving from an associate in the Mies office, specify the design as it was adapted to single lengths of curved stainless steel. This was a project piloted by Gerry Griffin in Chicago in 1960 and developed for full-scale industrial production by Knoll in 1964. The drawings address with great precision and thorough annotation the critical questions of joint, camber, and radius in the steel framework and the filleted and ribbed structure of the upholstery, with tubes of foam, all refined from an approach developed by Knoll in 1947.
MANSION HOUSE SQUARE, 1981-84
A group of 11 colour photographs from the studio of John Donat showing city models, site models, floor models, and visualisations in contextual montage. They are associated with the planning applications for Mies’ tower and plaza in the City of London, which he originally proposed to the developer Peter Palumbo in the early 1960s. The RIBA Library holds an extensive archive relating to the project donated by Peter Palumbo, which includes a file of Donat’s transparencies.
