The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on he Building Art.
By Fritz Neumeyer, translated by Mark Jarzombek. The MIT Press, 1991, rev. 1994. Reviewed by John W. Clark
Of the many publications on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to appear shortly following the centennial of his birth, Fritz Neumeyer's "The Artless Word" remains, together with Franz Schulze's excellent biography on Mies, the most insightful analysis of the development of the architect's thought. It is truly a refreshing ground-breaking book. At a time when much architecture seeks to distinguish itself through overwrought or superficial detail, this exploration of the critical connection between philosophy and form in Mie's work is a particularly enjoyable reminder of his return to the fundamentals of building.
As the first comprehensive compilation of Mies's writings to be underscored by a philosophical analysis that explores their relationship to his architecture, The Artless Word is the most thorough presentation of Mie's theoretical legacy. By clarifying the architect's philosophical background, Neumeyer, professor of Architectural Theory at the Technical University, Berlin, brings a new perspective on Mies's oscillation between proclassicism and anticlassicism, as well as on the tension between structural determinism and spiritual concerns in his work. He also addresses the development and continuity of key architectural themes throughout Mies's career.
Neumeyer attends to such conflicting influences as Catholicism, Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche on the development of Mies's architecture. Here, Neumeyer stresses the importance of Mies's relationship with his first independent client, the philosopher and Neitzsche scholar Alois Riehl, who became a philosophical mentor and with whom Mies remained friends until Riehl's death in 1924. European artistic culture at the turn of the century was strongly influenced by the Nietzschean precept of aesthetic salvation, with art as the "reflection of the will." (Le Corbusier was also strongly affected by the work of the philosopher; as was Peter Behrens, "the architect of Zarathustra," with whom Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies apprenticed. Mies later came to reject Behrens's work as too formalist and lacking in "real ideas.") Riehl's philosophy tempered Nietzsche's stress on autonomous will with service to a deeper metaphysical order-the "ancient Good" of which Riehl considered the new "Good" a mere transformation. Mies's early Catholic training in Aachen had already instilled in him the sense of a deeper significance existing beneath surface appearance, thus making him sensitive to Riehl's merging of neoplatonic metaphysics with Nietzschean philosophy.
Mies's amalgam of diverse, seemingly conflicting sources in his architecture, and his emphasis on ancient principle, have strong similarities to Riehl's synthesis of divergent philosophical currents. Neumeyer cites a broad scope of original source material, which provides fascinating parallels to Mies's architecture. Here it is interesting to compare the atheist Nietzsche with the Catholic religious philosopher and architect Rudolf Schwarz. Nietzsche, in the 1887 book, "The Gay Science," said: "One day, and probably soon, we need some recognition of what above all is lacking in our big cities: quiet and wide, expansive places for reflection. Places with high-ceilinged cloisters...where no shouting or noise of carriages can reach...buildings and sited that would altogether give expression to the sublimity of thoughtfulness and of stepping aside."
In a 1928 letter to Romano Guardini, Schwarz wrote: "Once more, in a very modest way, I remark that the idea of the castle as a series of large, pure, and almost empty rooms was my very own at a time when architects were not aware of it (most of them do not even know it today) and coziness was trump in the castle. I had to take a thorough thrashing on account of my empty chapel."
Schwarz, who claimed the idea of the large, pure, virtually empty space as his own, seemed unaware of Nietzsche's earlier plea for such space. Schwarz stressed the spiritual benefits of "free movement is space, the most beautiful and exhilarating result of technology." Mies later embarked on a process of emptying space, notable in such works as the Farnsworth House in 1945 and Crown Hall in 1950. Neumeyer traces the influence of Guardini's and Schwarz's thinking-the placement of spiritual concerns before materialism-on the reorientation of Mies's thinking. Thus, Mies tempered his Nietzsche/Behrens-influenced conception of "the building art is the spatially apprehended will of the epoch, nothing else" and began, in the late twenties, to react to mechanistic/functionalist doctrines and to emphasize the spiritual decisions connected with buildings: "The building art is always the spatial expression of spiritual decisions."
Also noteworthy here is Thomas Beeby's fascinating exposition of certain parallels between Mies, Schwarz, and American Protestant thought, in his essay, "When the Sacred Journey Ends," published in Thresholds, 1982. Until the publication of "The Artless Word, this essay was a completely anomalous interpretation of Mies's work.
The Artless Word is richly and intelligently illustrated. It also carries a substantial appendix of all of Mies's essential manifestos, notebooks, texts, and lectures (published and unpublished), including many that have not before appeared in English translation. (The 800 volumes from Mies's library that form the basis for much of the original research for this book are in the collection of the University of Illinois at Chicago.)
Until Schulze's biography and this book, the philosophical background of Mies's writings and thinking had been left largely unexplored. Particularly when compared with the quantity and scope of publications on Le Corbusier, Mies's work had previously encouraged relatively little original interpretation and analysis. The author blamed the fairly routine treatment Mies's work had frequently received on the example set by Philip Johnson's initial monograph, which established a pattern for most subsequent writings on Mies. These, Neumeyer notes, played down internal contradictions, the tensions in his work between classicism and neoplasticism, and primarily treated his earlier work as preparatory for his later mature American work. While Mies's more well-known writings have been frequently appended, as in Johnson's example, they are generally left as self-explanatory. Johnson, Neumeyer notes, further encouraged this lack of analysis by insisting that Mies did not read and that, at the time of his emigration from Germany, he had "only three books." In marked contrast, Mies claimed to own 3,000 books at this time. Neumeyer's study of Mies's excerpt-filled notebooks, and his library with its frequent underlining and marginalia, reveal Mies's true autodidactic intellectual tenacity and belies Johnson's assertion. No doubt this lack of analysis is also due in part to Mies's ostensible discounting of architectural theory in favor of building, as well as to the deceptive clarity of his work. (Mies's laconic "Don't talk, build" statements have all the verve of a Chicago aldermanic proclamation; but as Neumeyer shows, there is far more philosophical substance here than is readily apparent.)
This book has particular relevance in Chicago, of course. Since the Great Chicago Fire, German architecture has continually influenced and renewed the work of Chicago architects. German architects began pouring into the Midwest in the 1850's. The work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the architects of the Berlin school influenced Chicago's architectural theory and design early, contributing to the development of Chicago Modernism, as reflected in the work of such Chicago architects of German descent as the Edward and Frederick Baumann, John Mills Van Osdel, Dankmar Adler, and Richard Schmidt, and in the Prairie School and First Chicago School. These latter developments in turn directly affected the course of German, Dutch, and Austrian architecture, most notably through the neoplasticist movement, Gropius, Mies, and Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on Berlage and Wagner. These currents then returned to Chicago, in the form of Mies, to again have a profound impact on the mid-20th century course of Chicago architecture. Josef Paul Kleihues's design for the Museum of Contemporary Art and Helmut Jahn's work in Chicago and Germany are examples of this perennial cross-pollination. The development of Chicago and German Modernism are inextricably linked.
Particularly from the standpoint of Chicago's architectural culture, and in light of continuing debates over increasingly stylistic, formal approaches to architecture, The Artless Word is fascinating as well as refreshing. Mies's work looks better all the time.
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