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ARCHITECTURE

IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY

Mies in USA

Week 12.2

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WORLD HISTORY ART HISTORY ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

Wrights flight airplane 1903 Machintosh builds Hill House

Einstein announces relativity theory 1905 First Fauve exhibit, Die Brücke founded

Earthquake shakes San Francisco 1906 Gaudi starts building Casa Mila

1907 Brancusi carves first abstract sculpture

1908 Picasso and Braque found Cubism

1908-13 Ash Can painters introduced realism Wright invents Prairie House

1910 Kandinsky paints first abstract canvas Adolf Loos builds Steiner house.

1911 Der Blaue Reiter formed

Henry Ford develops assembly line 1913 Armory Show shakes up American art

World War I declared 1914

1916 Dada begins

Lenin leads Russian revolution 1917 De Stijl founded

1918 Bauhaus formed

1920s Mexican muralists active

U.S. Women win vote 1920 Soviets suppress Constructivism

Hitler writes Mein Kampf 1924 Surrealists issue manifesto Gropius builds Bauhaus in Dessau

Lindbergh flies solo across Atlantic 1927 Buckminister Fuller designs Dymaxian House

Fleming discovers penicillin 1928

Stock Market crashes 1929 Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy sets style for Modernism

1930s American scene painters popular, Social Realists paint political art Empire State Building opens

FDR becomes President 1933

Commercial television begins 1939

U.S: enters WWII 1941

First digital computer developed 1944 Pope’s National Gallery is last major Classical

building in U.S.

Hiroshima hit with atom bomb 1945 Dubuffet coins term “L’Art Brut”

Mahatma Gandhi assasinated, Israel founded 1948

People’s Republic of China founded 1949

Oral Contraceptive invented 1950 Abstract expressionism recognized

1952 Harold Rosenberg coins term “Action Painting”

DNA structure discovered, Mt. Everest scaled 1953

Supreme Court outlaws segregation 1954

Salk invents polio vaccine 1955

Elvis sings rock’n roll 1956 Wright builds Guggenheim

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Mies after USA

In 1938 Mies van der Rohe settled in Chicago and took up an appointment as Director of the Architecture

Department of Armour Institute, which in 1940 became the College of Architecture, Planning and Design at

Illinois Institute of Technology. He also re-established his architectural practice and for the next 20 years he

divided his time between it and his teaching duties.

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860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, Illinois, 1949 Mıes‟s first high-rise building...The design principles

first expressed in 860-880 Lake Shore Drive were

copied extensively, and are now considered

characteristic of the modern International Style. The

towers were not entirely admired at the time they were

built, yet they went on to be the prototype for steel and

glass skyscrapers worldwide. 860-880 Lake Shore

Drive Apartments embody a Modernistic tone with their

verticality, grids of steel and glass curtain walls (a

hallmark of Mies‟ skyscrapers), and complete lack of

ornamentation. Since Mies was a master of minimalist

composition, his principle was “less is more” as

it is demonstrated in his self-proclaimed “skin and

bones” architecture.

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These buildings show clearly Mies van der Rohe‟s

development and refinement of a structural aesthetic based on

an open flexible plan. I

n contrast to many of his contemporaries, Mies van der Rohe

profoundly questioned the concept „form follows function‟

because he recognized that functional requirements often

change. He believed that building solutions should allow for an

optimum degree of flexibility in order to accommodate

economically the frequent need to revise the arrangement of

living and working spaces.

Thus, within a concept of overall size and complexity of function

taken in generalized terms, he chose to develop and work within

three building types: the low-rise skeleton frame building, the

high-rise skeleton frame building, and the single-storey clear-

span building. In all these types those functions not

requiring daylight, such as lecture theatres and law

courtrooms, and the fixed core accommodating lifts, stairs,

toilets and service ducts, are located within the interior

spaces of the plan, leaving the peripheral areas

available for the flexible arrangement of classrooms,

workshops, laboratories, offices, flats or exhibition spaces as

the particular building‟s function required.

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Seagram Building 1958

reinforced concrete structural frame

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fireproofed steel structural frame

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Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, 1946-51

Following a number of unrealized projects, the first built example of Mies van der Rohe‟s single-storey clear-span

building was the Farnsworth House, Plano, IL —one of the best-known houses of the 20th century. The house, which

is raised above the ground against the Fox River‟s spring flooding, comprises a classically proportioned and finely

crafted white steel structure with rectangular floor and roof planes cantilevering beyond externally positioned „I‟ section

columns—the space between being subdivided into interior and exterior living areas.

The house has a distinctly independent personality, yet also

evokes strong feelings of a connection to the land. The levels of

the platforms restate the multiple levels of the site, in a kind of

poetic architectural rhyme, not unlike the horizontal balconies

and rocks do at Wright's Fallingwater.

**** The house is anchored to the site in the cooling shadow of a large and majestic

black maple tree. As Mies often did, the entrance is located on the sunny

side, facing the river instead of the street, moving visitors around

corners and revealing views of the house and site from various angles

as they approach the front door. The simple elongated cubic form of the house

is parallel to the flow of the river, and the terrace platform is slipped downstream in

relation to the elevated porch and living platform. Outdoor living spaces are

extensions of the indoor space, with a screened porch (screens now gone) and

open terrace. Yet the man made always remains clearly distinct from the natural

by its geometric forms, highlighted by the choice of white as its primary

color.

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Glass walls and open interior space are the

features that create an intense connection with

the outdoor environment, while the exposed

structure provides a framework that reduces

opaque exterior walls to a minimum.

The careful site design and integration of the

exterior environment represents a concerted effort

to achieve an architecture wedded to its natural

context.

Mies conceived the building as an indoor-

outdoor architectural shelter simultaneously

independent of and intertwined with the domain of

nature.

Reconnecting the individual with nature is one of the great challenges of an urbanized society. The

60-acre (240,000 m2) rural site offered Mies an opportunity to bring man's relationship to

nature into the forefront. Here he highlights the individual's connection to nature through the

medium of a man-made shelter. Mies said: "We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and the

human being to a higher unity".

In the interior area (enclosed by large sheets of plate-glass and paved

with Roman Travertine marble), living, sleeping and kitchen spaces are

subtly defined around a free-standing wood-panelled core housing

bathrooms and services. The exterior area, also paved with Travertine,

forms a protected terrace, and this is connected by a flight of steps to a

lower open floating terrace and similar steps to the ground. There is no

suggestion of a contrived (zoraki) formal relationship between the house

and its natural surroundings, and the building‟s occurrence in the

landscape would seem almost fortuitous (şans eseri) were it not for

the harmony achieved between it and the terrain. Its independence of,

and at the same time interdependence with, its surroundings creates a

convincing and moving image in a technological era and is prophetic of

the handling of the relationships of buildings to context in many future

projects.

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As a microcosm of the mature work of Mies van der Rohe the Farnsworth House has all the elements of the

developed clear-span single-storey building type as exemplified by the larger Crown Hall (College of

Architecture, 1950-56) at IIT and the new Nationalgalerie (1962–8), Tiergarten, Berlin. The former has a

rectangular steel roof structure carried by external steel plate girder (putrel/ kiriş) portal frames; the latter has a

square steel roof structure supported in a cantilevered manner by eight peripherally located steel cruciform

columns.

Centrally located on the campus of the

Illinois Institute of Technology, four miles

south of downtown Chicago, Illinois, the

building houses the architecture school:

The two level building is configured as a

pure rectangular form, enclosing a

column free interior space on the upper

level sitting above a sunken lower level.

The roof is supported by exposed steel

columns supporting exterior steel girders

(putrel/ kiriş) visible above the roof.

Crown Hall is characterized by an

aesthetic of industrial simplicity, with

clearly articulated exposed steel frame

construction. The steel frame is infilled

with large sheets of glass of varying

qualities of transparency, resulting in a

light and delicate steel and glass facade

wrapping (covering) the open plan, free

flowing interior of the upper level. While

the lower level consists of

compartmentalized rooms, the high upper

floor level, occupying almost 50% of the

total area of the building, is dedicated to a

single glass-enclosed architecture studio

space. Mies called it a "universal space",

intended to be entirely flexible in use.

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In many of Mies van der Rohe‟s buildings his introduction of externally projecting steel, aluminium or

bronze „I‟-shaped mullions, the projection of structure is said to be “a modern interpretation of the

Greek, Roman and Gothic principle of manifest structural order.” As in classical buildings, Mies‟s

designs stands out with a greater perfection succeeded by subtle improvements in proportion and

detailing rather than by radical changes in overall expression. This is what we called “an immediately

recognizable Miesian look.”

Because Mies van der Rohe developed his concept of architecture in a logical manner from one

building to another, his work as a whole is endowed with a unity of purpose and expression.

Regardless of magnitude (büyüklük) or function the works belong together as a coherent group

and speak with a single architectural language. This consanguinity (kandaşlık) is due to a

number of factors: structural systems have been selected in accordance with the overall

requirements of the building‟s functions, and their components are revealed, either actually

or symbolically:

• non-load-bearing external skins and interior space-defining divisions are articulated

separately from stressed members, leaving no doubt as to what is structural and what is not;

• materials, whether natural or industrially produced, are used in such a way as to

acknowledge the nature of each;

• visible modules represent subdivisions of the structural bays in relation to function and provide

a tool for internal planning and a practical inducement to flexibility in use;

• careful and thorough detailing exemplifies to the user the visual refinement called for in the

further division of space;

• subtle proportions result from visual judgments, not systems;

• provisions are made for expressive response to changing conditions of light and weather.

In Mies van der Rohe‟s hands the critical interaction between building function, construction

and structure, which is at the heart of architecture, frequently touched true poetic expression.

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One cannot deny Mies‟s influence on the architects practising after World War II. He believed architecture to

be a historical process, and that in consequence architects should recognize relationships between the

significant facts of their own epoch and the ideas that are capable of guiding these facts in a direction

beneficial to society in general. In his own work he tried to reach a practical synthesis of this ideal with

the disciplines set by the principle of structure: he tried to evolve a truly contemporary language for

architecture, a language that comes from the past yet is open to the future.