The Presence of Mies

274 Pages·1996·12.927 MB·English

by  D. ed. Mertins, Detlef Mertins

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The Presence of Mies
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of this century’s most impor-
tant and influential architects, has alternately been revered and
reviled. The Presence of Miesis an interdisciplinary collection
of essays that take a fresh look at the work of this controver-
sial architect on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the Toronto-Dominion Centre. Unexpected perspectives have
been brought to bear on Mies, opening up new ways of think-
ing about his work and new possibilities for extending it into
contemporary architecture and cultural theory. The Presence
of Miesis a timely reevaluation of Mies’s buildings, writings,
and teaching in relation to issues of technology, image culture,
philosophy, art, and education.
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Edited by Detlef Mertins
Designed at Bruce Mau Design Inc.
with Nigel Smith
Typeset in Helvetica
Electronic Production by Seonaidh Davenport
Special thanks to
Caroline Green, Clare Jacobson, Sarah Lappin,
Kevin Lippert, Bill Monaghan, Ann Urban
Published by
Princeton Architectural Press
37 East 7th Street New York, New York 10003
212.995.9620
© 1994 Detlef Mertins and Princeton Architectural Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from
the publisher, except in the context of reviews.
Pamphlet Cover image taken from photograph of the Toronto-Dominion Centre at night, 1968.
Photo Panda. 68854-31.
Sponsored by The Canada Council and The Ontario Arts Council.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 1886–1969.
The presence of Mies / Detlef Mertins, editor ; George Baird...[et al., contributors].
p. cm.
“This publication follows the symposium...held on September 26, 1992 in the
Council Chamber of Toronto City Hall to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
Toronto-Dominion Centre”– –T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1–56898–020–5 : $24.95. – – ISBN 1–56898–013–2 (paper) ; $19.95. – –
ISBN 1–56898–020–5 (Mac disk) : $24.95. – – ISBN 1–56898–022–1 (Windows disk) :
$24.95
1. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 1886–1969– –Criticism and interpretation– –
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Presence of Miesbegan asasymposium held in 1992 to mark the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the Toronto-Dominion Centre, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
A project of the University of Toronto School of ArchitectureandLandscapeArch-
itecture, thesymposiumwassponsoredbyTheCanadaCouncilandtheToronto-
DominionCentre,asmajorsponsors,theRoyalArchitecturalInstituteofCanada,
Knoll,theCityofToronto,theUniversityofTorontoArchitecture Students Union, the
Steel Structures Education Foundation, the Goethe Institute (Toronto), Ballenford
Architectural Books, the Toronto Society of Architects, and Artsweek. This publication
has been generously funded by The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
ManythankstoBrigitteShimforco-organizingthesymposium,BrianBoigonfor
hiscriticalinsights,AnthonyEardleyandKomalaPrabhakarfor their on-going support,
Nigel Smith and Burton Hamfelt for graphic design, DonaldChong,DatheWong,and
ElaineDydikfortheirdrawings, KirstenDouglasforassistingincoordination,Mike
AwadandJohnHowarthfor photography, and Mark Thompson for copy editing.
Special thanks to J. Robert, S. Prichard (President,UniversityofToronto),RobertE.
Millward(CommissionerofPlanningandDevelopment,CityofToronto)andMarc
Baraness(DirectorofArchitectureandUrbanDesign,CityofToronto)fortheirinvalu-
ablehelpinrealizing the symposium, and to Kevin Lippert and Ann Urban for publish-
ing the book. And finally, I am grateful to the authors whose enthusiasm and generos-
ity have made this project a unique pleasure.
Detlef Mertins
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Contents
Introduction
7 NEW MIES
Detlef Mertins
Practice
14 Punching Through the Clouds: Notes on the Place of the Toronto-
Dominion Centre in the North American Oeuvre of Mies
Phyllis Lambert
30 Mies’s Skyscraper “Project”: Towards the Redemption of
Technical Structure
Detlef Mertins
Technology
50 A World in Itself: Architecture and Technology
Fritz Neumeyer
64 Mies and Movement: Military Logistics and Molecular Regimes
Sanford Kwinter
Reworkings
77 The Receding Horizon of Mies: Work of the Cranbrook
Architecture Studio
Dan Hoffman
96 Renouncing Autistic Words
Ben Nicholson
Minimalism
110 The Grid, the /Cloud/, and the Detail
Rosalind Krauss
126 Mies van der Rohe and Minimalism
Ignasi de Solá-Morales Rubió
Openings
135 Looking for “The Public” in Mies van der Rohe’s Concept for
the Toronto-Dominion Centre
George Baird
157 Almost Nothing: Heidegger and Mies
Rebecca Comay
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Images
167 Mies Not
Beatriz Colomina
196 What’s so Funny: Modern Jokes and Modern Architecture
Brian Boigon
Afterword
208 Odysseus and the Oarsmen, or, Mies’s Abstraction Once Again
K. Michael Hays
222 Toronto-Dominion Centre
243 Bibliography
compiled by Kazys Varnelis
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Introduction
NEW MIES
Detlef Mertins
The photographs of Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto-Dominion Centre that open this
book (see pamphlet) register the transformations in its appearance over the course
of a day. Like other of Mies’s prismatic and elemental projects of the 1950s and
1960s, the TDC has often been interpreted as exemplary of the self-referential and
transcendental modernist object. Yet the photographs by Peter MacCallum reveal
the identity of this apparently autonomous block to be continually shifting under the
play of light and weather, from total opacity to total transparency, contingent on
conditions in its surroundings and on the perceptions of observers. What, then,
might the notion of “presence” mean for such a building whose identity is both sta-
ble and unstable, autonomous and contingent? Could it be that this seemingly
familiar architecture is still in many ways unknown, and that the monolithic Miesian
edifice refracts the light of interpretation, multiplying its potential implications for
contemporary architectural practices?
This collection of essays taps the multiple resonances of Mies’s work in current
thinking about architecture as it relates to issues of practice, technology, image
culture, philosophy, art, and education. How is Mies being opened up to new ques-
tions and reformulated problematics? How might various branches of contemporary
theory intersect with his work at a time when historical research is excavating the
prehistory of postmodernity within the early twentieth century? And how might criti-
cal transformations of Mies’s architecture serve for new work appropriate to our
own time?Tomarkthetwenty-fifthanniversaryoftheToronto-DominionCentre —
which Philip Johnson has called “the biggest Mies in the world” — a symposium
wasconvenedintheCouncilChamberofViljoRevell’sTorontoCityHall(1964)to
explorethesequestions.Themixtureofcontributorsanddisciplines produced a
stimulating array of perspectives weaving in and out of common themes and articu-
7 Introduction
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lating nuanced positions. Participants were grouped in pairs, each addressing a
topic that was at once distinct from but related to the others, producing provocative
convergences and a sense of compaction without suppressing tension and instabil-
ity. This collection of essays flows from that event.
Tobegin,PhyllisLambertandIreconsideraspectsofMies’sresearchand
practice.LambertexaminesMies’sdistinctivewayofworking,aprocessthrough
which design ideasslowly assumed corporeal presence in refined structural
typologies and tense groupingsof buildingscarefully calibratedto respond to
given programs, means, and contexts. (Punching Through the Clouds)Focusing
on the Berlin skyscraper projects of 1922 and the Toronto-Dominion Centre of
1967,my own contribution examinesMies’s conception of thearchitectural
“project”ascriticallymediatingbetweentheproblematicmaterialconditions
of modernityandidealistlongings forredemption andthereturn of origins.
(Mies’sSkyscraper “Project”)
FritzNeumeyer,whosebookonMies’swritingsTheArtlessWordisapoint of
reference for many of the other papers, and Sanford Kwinterboth addressissues
ofarchitecture’srelationshiptotechnology.WhileNeumeyerstaysclosetoMies’s
owntextsandprojectstodelineatehisconstructionofthe reciprocity of art and
technology, subject and object (A World in Itself), Kwinter places Mies’s architec-
tonic opposition between fixed structure and fluid space into the context of the
modern episteme as evident in Germany during the Weimarperiodanditsslippery
slideintoFascism— inpolymerscience,chemical technology, dance notation,
and the Autobahn program. (Mies and Movement)
Dan Hoffmanand Ben Nicholsondiscuss the pedagogical ambitions and work
of their design studios, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Illinois Institute of
Technology respectively, where they have extended and transformed aspects of
Mies’s architecture and teaching. Hoffman’s recent experimental work has been
tied to Mies’s investigations of grid, self-referentialfabrication,andperceptualhori-
zons.(The Receding Horizon of Mies) Nicholson’steachinghasbeen part of the
renewal of the curriculum at IIT, finally breaking from the ossified canonization of
Miesian form to rework his curriculum while maintaining aspects of its initial spirit.
(Renouncing Autistic Words)
RosalindKraussandIgnasideSolá-MoralesRubióstakeoutopposedinter-
pretations of Minimalism and Mies. Krauss distances her reading of Miesfromthe
recentrashofpoststructuralistandanti-classicalinterpretations (citing Robin
Evans, José Quetglas, and K. Michael Hays), preferring instead the modernist Mies
of the grid, whose work she reads as analogous to the paintings of Agnes Martin,
with their dialectical interplay of conceptual grid and perceptual effect. Krauss’s
return to the modernist Mies presents a challenge to rethink the idea of autonomy
in dialectical terms (The Grid, the /Cloud/, and the Detail), a challenge subse-
quently addressed by K. Michael Hays in his Afterword. Solá-Morales, on the other
8 Introduction
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hand, insists on an anti-classical interpretation, one that takes as its points of
departure sensations, perceptions, and materiality, rather than a prioriconceptual
categories such as the logic of vision represented by the grid. Solá-Morales contin-
ues here to elaborate his thinking towards an architecture of untimeliness. (Mies
van der Rohe and Minimalism)
Rebecca Comayand George Bairdboth test-drive Mies through philosophies
thatheneverread.Comay’sstagingofanencounterbetweenMiesandMartin
Heideggeraroundtheideaofthe“almostnothing”challenges the easy alliance that
has often been suggested and marks the profound differences between their think-
ing while recognizing the potential of ambiguous parallelisms. (Almost Nothing:
Heidegger and Mies) Baird’s struggle to interpret the Toronto-Dominion Centre in
relation to the idea of appearance in the public realm (as developed by Hannah
Arendt, who had studied with Heidegger) is equally tentative, but contributes to
understanding Mies’s existentialist transformation of the historical civic plaza and
public loggia. (Looking for “The Public”) While both of these engagements remain
tentative, they point to fruitful ways of thinking from Mies to contemporary philo-
sophical and political concerns.
The final papers by Beatriz Colominaand Brian Boigonaddress the cultureof
images.ColominabeginsbysuggestingthatMies’scarefulself-construction
throughtheoreticalprojectsandtextsinpublications,exhibitions,andothermedia
productionsisatoddswiththetectonicfoundation myth of Mies as the son of a
stonemason, and then goes on to suggest that Mies’s architecture also bears the
formal imprint of modern media such as photography. (Mies Not) Boigon presents
a clipped essay on modern jokery, stand-up comics, and curtain walls, drawing on
verbal and visual images that move in and out of modern (Miesian) architecture,
and up and down the ladder of (un)consciousness. (What’s so Funny)
In his Afterword, K. Michael Haysdrawson the preceding papers to put for-
ward a new interpretation of Mies’s abstraction, rereading the Seagram Building
through Theodor Adorno’s idea of the autonomous work of art as dialectically
embodying and resisting the conditions of a totally reified society.
By sidestepping received interpretations of Mies as homotopic — to use the
notion popularized by Demetri Porphyrios — these essays take stock of Mies’s
workcriticallyandservetoopenit—stillsohauntingandpowerful—in surprising
and unexpected directions. Just as the identity of the Toronto-Dominion Centre
may be understood to fragment and multiply when placed into the field of context
and reception — Sanford Kwinter asks the strategic question “To whom does Mies
belong?” — so the identity of the architect may also remain contingent and pro-
foundly mysterious. What, after all, might “presence” mean for a man who changed
his name in such a way as to undermine the plausibility of designating a discrete
and integrated unit of subjectivity
It has often been noted that the year 1921 was decisive for the young Ludwig
9 Introduction