Opposition and continuity in Mies' public space

Construction and structural expression in urban order

EURAU’12

ABSTRACT. Mies van der Rohe planned an order of construction and public space that goes further than the relations between location or project and production and forms. His work is characterised by a search of identity between matter and idea in a unitary and fragmented system of architecture and city. Public space manifests an evolution parallel to the tectonic order and the structural expression of his architecture. A process that is born of the perception of the skeleton-and-skin principle shown in the theoretic projects realized from 1921-1923 in contrast and juxtaposition to the transformed city. The construction with elements is applied to the Mies´ plan and block housing of Stuttgart and the exhibition projects from 1926-1929 in a conception of grouping and structural proposal common to the house, the city and the landscape that would be developed in his following works as a tectonic oppositions and spatial continuity system integrated in a real form.

KEYWORDS. opposition, continuity; structure, public space; Mies

Enrique Colomés Montañés

Architectonical Projects Department Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid Avenida Juan de Herrera 4 28040 Madrid (Spain) enrique.colomes@upm.es; enriquecolomes@arquired.es 0034913366597 - 0034915421569

City and construction: uniformity and diversity

In the perspectives of the unbuilt projects of glass and concrete office buildings made between 1921 and 1923, Mies set urban order by the opposition and continuity of the new architecture with its environment (1). On the one hand, there is an intention of transformation of the city in the perception of the structure and aerial envelope materialized by the light in contrast with the buildings nearby. The qualities of transparency, reflection and mass-effect are expressed livelily by the tectonic skeleton-and-skin order and represented in opposition with sober, opaque and sombre buildings of its environment (2). On the other hand, the integration is achieved by juxtaposition as a notion of accumulation of the monumental masses with the real city and continuity of the public space surrounding them.

Public space is conceived in these urban proposals of transcendent urban intention as perception and movement range of the new architecture in a scene of structural oppositions of gravity and light acting on the matter (3). Typological clarity and unity of construction are compatible in them with fragmentation and diversity in reaction against monotony. The matter is fractured by the action of gravity and light in the same way the city is perceived as unity and fragmentation.

In the proposal for the 1921 Friedrichstraße office building competition, the urban presence of the skyscraper is drawn in a fragmented manner by the lighting effects of the envelope. The expressive construction contrasts with the real buildings represented in the photomontages. The goal is to make a global impression enhanced by this opposition while the spatial continuity is manifested itself in the homogeneity of the three sides of the tower shown in the urban perspectives surrounding the site from different points of view. This competition project inaugurates a tectonic opposition and spatial continuity that will be confirmed by the curvilinear shape of the second skyscraper´s project made shortly after.

(Fig.1)

Matter and space as a dialectical intention of the urban order can also be found in the 1923 concrete office building´ perspective. In the charcoal drawing of big dimensions the reinforced-concrete structure is seen in transparency from the outside (4) and the envelope is drawn with an uneven and expressive lighting texture in clear contrast with its context. The transformative construction is, however, presented in a scene partially overlapped by a nearby building in a fragmented sight that doesn’t allow a complete view of its lineal structure. On the contrary, the slightly foreshortening perspective unveils the lateral façade and encourages an imaginary trajectory contrary to the direction of the frontal vanishing perspective, affirmed by the position of the ground floor access and the suggested by the continuity of the street.

This partial and fragmented perception of the building will be characteristic of the collages and perspectives along the Mies van der Rohe’s work, where buildings will be partially represented, usually overlapping with other elements, such as buildings and trees, in a public space conceived as interstices in an urban order of oppositions and continuity that can be only fully appreciated by the different points of view and travelling.

It’s this notion of matter uniformity and diversity as a way of urban development that Mies translates to Stuttgart’s 1925-1927 Weißenhofsiedlung, in which he projects an architectonical unity of different actuations and materials in a cultural and artistic interpretation of the house, the city and the landscape. In a sense, Mies establishes the grouping and public space as a previous shape to the housing buildings. The fragmented conception differs from the new functionalist way of building considered by Mies as monotonous and formalist (5). The evolution in this proposal was generated from municipal requirements: the first model of the site expressed the topological balance of material and spatial continuity achieved by the union of all the buildings with pedestrian terraces. The second proposal, however, presented a radical change in the conception of public form and space as it disintegrated in independent buildings divided by traffic streets though maintaining, nevertheless, the conceptual coherence as grouping (6).

The continuous materiality of the first proposal and the open arrangement of the second one have in common two essential issues as they maintain the ascendant order of the urban formation reflected in the different heights of the different types of housing preserving too the use of a sole finishing material and colour as unifying criterion (7). Though the independent buildings didn’t maintain the physical continuity of the first proposal they preserve the diverse and fragmented topological arrangement of elements of a single material. A form conception that Mies revealed being of medieval inspiration (8). At the same time, the pedestrian and traffic, public spaces of the two Stuttgart projects are understood as interstices and walks born of the massiveness and interprenetrability between white single material planes whose relations and proximity suggest a sculptural notion of the group (9).

Structural proposal of materials, space and colour

(Fig.2)

The formal evolution of the Weißenhofsiedlung is parallel to that from the continuous spatial wall system of the 1923 brick house to the free and independent planes characteristic of the glass and silk exhibits that Mies made along with Lilly Reich in 1927, and the 1928-1929 German pavilion. In these installations the main material is enhanced in a structure of oppositions of material, space and colour activated by gravity and light in an escalated proposal of the interior and exterior space (10). The intense artistic sense in the relation between elements leads the minimal construction of these installations in an art-technology dialectic that is incorporated as a new structural expression of the aerial surfaces to the notion of grouping and order (11).

In the 1927 Silk Exhibit in Berlin, the opaque and low velvets and the translucent and high silks formed an ascending arrangement where the new limits and trajectories spread over the totality of the nave illuminated with natural white light as an exterior. The multiple walks and the interstitial spaces between clothes slightly separated from the continuous white floor are conceived as spatial conceptual symmetries of other realities such as the house or the city, in an identity of interior and exterior space according to Mies one space conception:

It always comes down to same question, only in one case we need to work with walls and in another case in a group of buildings with buildings, but it always comes down to same question. (12)

Berlin silk’s installation is proposed as one architecture inside another, and is a precedent reference for the following urban projects and big pavilions where free elements are referred to a structural geometrical net in a universal homogeneous space (13).

Free grouping of buildings: structural space-form unity

(Fig.3)

The structural expression of opposed qualities developed at the exhibits is brought to the house and the city. The materials and visuals qualities are incorporated both to the walls of the last 20´s - 30´s coart houses and to the proposals for the urban competitions of the Adam building in Berlin and the 1928 Stuttgart bank. In these public buildings Mies inserted in the photomontages drawings of lighted envelopes as a translucent membrane of lively, crystalline and textile qualities in an arrangement determined by the horizontal and vertical geometrical guideline of construction common to the urban pattern of city. This structure-space relation is one-step more developed in the collage for the contest of the 1928 Alexanderplatz reform where the disposition of buildings of different heights is conceived as a free arrangement of straight structured skins interrelated by the precise orthogonal geometry of its modulated construction. This new public space determined by the tectonic order becomes independent from the alignments in a domain defined by the proximity and the tension perceived from urban proximities.

The modulation of the architectonical structure spreads as a homogeneous grid of public space and formal unity in the 1938 Illinois Institute of Technology Campus. The studies of the university buildings’ arrangement yet to be projected are conceived as an abstract and prior system of exterior and interior relations. The clarity of the construction is expressed and incorporated to urban order as a solution to the unity and fragmentation of the main plan task:

I’ve always worked with ordered relations. Let’s take, for instance, the IIT Campus buildings: we drew a 7.3x7.3 m grid covering the whole campus so we could put a pillar in every intersection. This way it is possible to connect every single building anywhere and still keep the original system. (14)

The campus buildings were posterior to the decision of this open enclosure designed taking into account construction and public space at once (*). Opposing to the forced intention of movement the philosophy of the relation between future buildings and the grid was based on flexibility, in a process-form conceived as grouping-contrast of different structural types as pavilions with great lights and different-height portico-frame buildings.

Public space in the IIT is characterized by the duality and opposition of external symmetries of the layout of the traffic streets and internal asymmetries of the pedestrian space. The campus consists of two central and symmetrical blocks defining the main exterior square of the campus extended to the more dynamic and asymmetrical pedestrian spaces. Buildings are seen as overlapping fragments in a homogeneous and diverse totality that cannot be understood from a single point of view, but from a multiple trajectory. This spatial opposition and continuity intention is projected to the interior galleries and symmetric plans of the portico-frame buildings and greatly illuminated pavilions of the Campus.

The grid of the IIT proposes at last an integrating urban and architectonic system of the planning’s reticular geometry, the open structural order of the buildings and the free interior and exterior spaces as a unity.

Urban intervention: structural and public spaces opposition

(Fig.4)

The 1956 Hyde Park urban reform is a sample of the Mies transformation manner by contrast and juxtaposition of material structures and public spaces in a real city. In the project model, the new steel-structured buildings are strongly emphasized in black colour in contrast with the clearer structures of previous buildings made of traditional materials. Following an approach characteristic of Mies American groupings initiated with IIT, the pedestrian areas with gardens are juxtaposed to traffic streets. The open plan of the interior block spaces filled with trees is

overlapped to the regular traffic grid. Urban order is transformed by the tension of the lighted envelops conforming an alternate trajectory and pedestrian paths of a multiple and open vision. The shadows and the shape of every building of the model indicate height and section of the buildings and the proportion of public spaces.

The starting point of the 1956-1963 Lafayette Park’s arrangement project (15) is the will to obtain a great green natural pedestrian space independent from vehicles where the density, distributed between different-height buildings, makes possible the free introduction of trees. The structural will of opposition and continuity is reflected in the use of polarized materials in the structures of both height typologies. The buildings are arranged in an ascending order in which short and tall buildings are the structural expression of gravity and lightness in a contrary tension. Lafayette Park’s row-buildings express a visual weight in the black colour of the structural steel contrasting with the white envelopes of silver aluminium of which the towers that appear to be floating.

The proposal and structural expression of material, space and colour of the exhibits, in which the different materials are polarized in colour series, seems to be transferred this way to the urban scale of the residential park. The freed pedestrian public space and trees are limited by this combination of typologies in material and visual opposition of dimensions and structures in a notion that Mies proposed to be universal or general:

[...] from a beginning we projected it our way. [...] There are in every city of the word areas like these. We can avoid the propagation of these nonsense suburban single-family houses. [...] Instead of eating up the land, cities should have developed in a reasonable combination of high and tall buildings. (16)

The vegetation is wrapped up by the envelopes and the foliage is reflected in big glass surfaces in an interaction between the trees and the metallic structures of different materials and colours. This notion of oppositions between different elements of public space suggests at the same time the equivalence with the furniture that’s been carefully laid out in the proximity with the different materials in the installations and interiors (17). The Lafayette Park model and photographs shows this equivalence of the wooded area as hanging out spaces conceived a natural and vegetal furnishing.

Opposition public space and vertical structure.

(Fig.5)

In Mies skyscrapers two exterior spaces referred to different points of view and scales of the city coexist: on the one hand, there’s the public space spread-out with no apparent limits in the horizontal and continuous dimension of the diaphanous ground floor that is only interrupted by the distant support of the structure on the ground, and, on the other hand, there’s a huge urban and landscape space that is like sculpted by the monumental limits of reticular structure, steel profiles and glass (20).

The 1941-1951 Lake Shore Drive Building towers suggest with their orthogonal disposition a trihedral configuration. The distant perspective from Lake Michigan is supported by the vertical rhythm of the envelopes with the effects of depth and frontality (18). The orthogonal connection of the towers is enhanced by the light’s polarity in the illuminated and shadowed planes, which generates a recognizable figure in a large area as a glass and steel balcony facing Michigan Lake.

In the 1954-1958 New York Seagram building the square is projected in the unified intention of space and construction. The mass visual effect of the tower as a whole is the aim of this great bronze wall-curtain that is identified as a unifying structural element in a uniform reddish colour of its components: metal, curtains and tinted glass. Additionally to the street-urban intention, the aim of this space-square is that of being a preceding space of perception the mass-effect of the tower. The lack of perspective of New York streets is the reason behind the creation of this new area. On the impression that arose the Rockefeller building on his arrival to New York and on the new Seagram building project Mies said:

[...] It can be appreciated that that block (Rockefeller), that has nothing to do with the style, is a mass. It’s not something individual, it’s the thousand windows. [...] When you look at the mass, you can’t see the details. I think that’s the quality of the (Seagram) tower. [...] I set it back to be able to see it. When you visit New York, you really need to look at the marquees to know where you are. You can’t even see the building, only from afar. It’s for this reason that I set it back. (19)

On the other hand, the dihedral angle formed by the tower’s vertical plane and the square’s horizontal one is a clear underlying idea and common ground in the location of Mies projects, as well as in the formation of his interiors and exteriors’ stay ambits. The sketches of the Seagram building show just the square, defined by the great clear pink granite flagstones and the bronze vertical profiles that suggest a spatial and tectonic similarity to the floating and great high silks of the 1927 Berlin exhibit (20).

As in the Lake Shore Drive towers and the Seagram building, the public space in the great urban skyscrapers’ centres is based in the continuous and horizontal ground floor. The urban space and city scale is defined by the visual and textile qualities of the different structural typologies and heights. The transparent and reflecting surfaces are interrelated because of its diverse structural expression. New public spaces are interstices between the vertical structures built overlapping the orthogonal grid of corridor streets in perspectives and multiple independent pedestrian walks. About these urban centres Mies referred Chicago Federal Center 1959-1964, Canada’s 1963-1969 Toronto-Dominion Centre and 1964-1967 Westmount Square in Montreal for the significance of the open space:

The common characteristic is that we arranged the buildings in a way in which each of them receives their optimal situation and in which the existing space between them is the best we can set. I would use this same principle even in the construction of a group of isolated houses, only maybe the interstitial space would be smaller. (21)

Along the work of Mies van der Rohe, urban order is proposed as the opposition and continuity of the structural expression and new spaces integrated in a real form in the transformed city.

Notes

1 In the glass and concrete office projects Mies proposes insertion in the real city. (TEGETHOFF, 1989).

2 The three qualities of the structural intention of Friedrichstraße’s competition are explicitly named by Mies in the project’s report published in Frühlicht, nº 2 of 1922.

3 The theoretical projects and the exhibits confirm the approximation and the influence of the renovation of scenic and visual arts in Mies’ 20s architecture.

4 The large windows located above a man’s head allowed, however, the sight from the exterior of the structure slabs from its inferior point of view.

5 In 1925 Mies wrote about Frankfurt’s municipal architect position that the authorities should look for a non-routiniere architect (SCHULZE, 1986). At the International Architecture Exhibition that was organized in Weimar in September 1923, Mies criticized the formalism shown at the exhibit (TEGETHOFF, 1989).

6 The first pedestrian arrangement is rejected by municipal authorities as they considered the durability of the constructions, the need for traffic accesses and the fragmentation in lots. (SCHULZE, 1986).

7 The Stuttgart’s Weißenhofsiedlung has been usually associated with the medieval inspiration of the city of Berlage and the urban utopia of Bruno Taut’s Stadtkrone (‘crown of the city’). Ludwig Hilberselmer believes that the stuccoed termination has its origin in the Middle Age, when the employ of a single material was used in

order to achieve a uniformity of the styles adapted in time. A styling notion that Mies identifies as building personal way in Sttutgart (HILBERSEIMER, 1956).

8 The medieval city was for Mies an archetype of urban and constructive unity in the typological repetition and in the richness of the particular answers.

9 This is a sculptural attitude noticed by Arthur Drexler in the 1926 Luxemburg’s monument blocks, apparel to the works of the Dutch sculptor Vantongerloo (DREXLER, 1960). Mies participated in 1924 in Werkbund conferences with Paul Hanning defending an elemental construction or “elementare Gestaltung” (SCHULZE, 1986).

10 The 1927 glass and silk exhibits are spaces prior to the German pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibit (NAVARRO, 1983).

11 The art-technology dialectic as been stablished as conceptual and philosophic opposition in his work (NEUMEYER, 1986) (NEUMEYER, 1989).

12 (MIES VAN DER ROHE, 1964).

13 Jean Louis Cohen sees the 1929 Industry Pavilion in Barcelona as an accident of the great light pavilions (COHEN, 1994). The 1927 Velvet and Silk Café is an important precursor of the 1942 Concert Room’s proposal.

14 (MIES VAN DER ROHE, 1959).

15 Hilberselmer made the general plan of Lafayette Park (BLASER, 1972).

16 (MIES VAN DER ROHE, 1959)

17 Phillip Johnson compares Mies carefulness of furnishing with the precise location of his buildings in the city. He also points out the contrast of the silks with the tubular furnishing made for the showing as a characteristic effect of the exhibit (JOHNSON, 1947).

18 (FRAMPTON, 1984).

19 (MIES VAN DER ROHE, 1964).

20 Kenneth Frampton has pointed out the textile nature of the construction of the envelope of Mies’ skyscrapers (FRAMPTON, 1980) (FRAMPTON, 1995).

21 (MIES VAN DER ROHE, 1964).

Legends

Fig.1 Concrete office building, 1922 and Model of the first proposal of Stuttgart’s Weißenhof Colony, Stuttgart 1926-1927. Fig.2 Silk Exhibit, Berlin 1927. Fig.3 Perspective drawing of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago 1939. Fig.4 Lafayette Park, Detroit 1956-1963. Fig.5 Westmount Square, Montreal 1965-1968 and Toronto-Dominion Centre, Toronto 1963-1969.

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Biography

Enrique Colomés Montañés graduated (MA) as an architect in 1985 by Madrid’s Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, where he teaches Architectonic Projects as Profesor Asociado y Tutor de Proyecto Fin de Carrera. He’s a guest professor in the Architecture Schools of Pamplona, Karlsruhe, Liboa, Grenoble and Autónoma de México, D. F.

Publications of research works on Mies van der Rohe: codirector of the project Mies: “Velvet and Silk Café” at the “Arquitecturas Ausentes del s. XX” exhibition organized by the Ministerio de Fomento, Madrid 2004-Bruxels 2010; and communication “Material, luz y color en la arquitectura de Mies van der Rohe” in the “I Miguel Fisac International Congress: La materia de la arquitectura”, Fundación Fisac, Almagro, 2007. PhD Thesis on “Café Samt & Seide de Mies van der Rohe y Lilly Reicht, Berlin, 1927. Materia, espacio y color: hacia una propuesta estructural en la arquitectura de Mies van der Rohe”. He’s also currently guest research Professor in Technishe Universität - Berlin.

Free practice of profession since 1986, taking part in national and international competitions and receiving different prizes and awards. Among his urban and landscape work has significance the cultural equipment projects and buildings and architectonic interventions in natural protection sites, historic urban centres and BIC (Bien de Interés Cultural). His built work has been selected in diverse biennial exhibits of spanish and european architecture, distinguished with nationwide recognized awards, collected in national and foreign publications and presented in international architecture congresses.