FRIEDRICHSTRASSE SKYSCRAPER
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1922
A Crystalline Skyscraper Clad in Glass
In 1922, a design for a radically new kind of skyscraper appeared in Germany. The Friedrichstrasse Tower, by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was not square, nor rectangular, nor even round. It was a unique crystalline shape and it was clad entirely in shining glass. On its proposed site in Berlin, next to traditional, low-rise buildings ornamented in the Classical style, it would have created a sensation. But it was too forward-looking and was never built. However, Mies’s outstanding design has haunted and influenced architects of tall buildings ever since.
Its story began in 1921, when a new company, the Turmhaus Aktiengesellschaft (Tower House Company) announced a competition for designs for a new office building in Berlin. The site was a triangular plot next to the Friedrichstrasse railway station, and the competition asked for a 263ft- (80m-) tall building, accompanied by a properly calculated list of the usable floor space. There was a sizeable prize on offer, and the competition was attractive to architects in other ways, too: it was a high-profile site and large building projects were scarce.
From the point of view of Mies, the competition was a major opportunity. Before the First World War, he had been designing mostly small buildings – villas for middle-class clients – in the Classical style. However, he had become one of the many architects who thought that, after the disaster of the war, architecture should make a new start, going back to basics and not relying on the revivals of historical styles that had dominated architecture in the nineteenth century.
The 144 architects who entered the Turmhaus Aktiengesellschaft competition found various solutions to the challenging triangular site: the entries included round, triangular and star-shaped plans, many of them traditionally decorated in historical styles. None of them made use of the whole site, and with good reason: filling up the whole plot would mean that natural light could not reach the middle of the building. Architects had a rule of thumb that dictated that no one sitting in an office should be more than 25ft (7.5m) from a window.
Mies worked out a way of letting more light into the building while also making use of the entire site, to maximize the floor area. He did this with a unique plan consisting of three wedge-like shapes, linked at the centre of the plan but divided by light wells at the edges. As well as being an ingenious way of letting in more natural light, this was also one of the features that gave the tower its distinctive, crystalline form. No other building had such sharply pointed corners, or presented such a dramatic combination of planes and spaces to its street facade.
However, the thing that really set Mies’s skyscraper apart was the fact that it has no conventional walls. Its steel framework is clad entirely, from top to bottom, in glass. No one had ever designed a building like this before. The skyscrapers of Chicago and New York, which inspired the German architects who entered the Berlin competition, had steel frames hidden by a cladding of masonry. Some had large windows, but these were always set in a substantial surrounding framework. They also had features such as stone plinths at pavement level, grand doorways set in decorative stone frames, and ornament in a historical style such as Classical or Gothic. Mies did away with all of this at a stroke.
Mies probably got the idea of this crystalline glass cladding from looking at photographs of skyscrapers under construction. He clearly admired the appearance of their steel frames, as well as their engineering. Mies contrasted the character of the framework with the sham decoration of the masonry of conventional skyscrapers: ‘Only in the course of their construction do skyscrapers show their bold, structural character, and then the impression made by their soaring skeletal frames is overwhelming. On the other hand, when the facades are later covered with masonry this impression is destroyed…’ What was left when a skyscraper’s structure was hidden away behind meaningless decoration was, according to Mies, ‘a senseless and trivial chaos of forms’.
The architect could also justify his design in terms of functionalism – the architectural doctrine that a building’s form should be determined by the needs of its users. From a functionalist point of view, the glass walls and crystalline shape were justified by the need to get lots of natural light into the building, while keeping the floor space as large as possible. The design certainly succeeded in these terms. Even allowing for the fact that Mies’s building has an unusually large floor-to-ceiling height (to let in yet more light, while reducing the possible number of storeys), he crammed more square footage onto the site than his competitors. Revolutionary in form, stunning to look at and functionally sound, the tower should have been a triumph.
But Mies did not win the competition. His design was too unusual to win, and was dismissed by the judges, along with other impressive contenders such as strong, unornamented, modern-looking proposals by Hugo Häring and Hans Poelzig. The panel favoured instead a squat, fifteen-storey building clad in brick, which was not built either. The site had to wait decades for a full redevelopment, with a curvaceous structure designed by Marc Braun, in 1992.
Neither the judges nor most commentators picked out Mies’s design for special praise or comment, but the architect did not let the glass skyscraper idea go. He published both the Friedrichstrasse design and a variation on the same theme in the magazine Frühlicht in 1922. The variant design is taller than the Friedrichstrasse Tower and has curved walls, but with a similar plan, using indentations and protrusions to allow natural light into every part of each floor. This design was not intended for a specific client – it was Mies’s way of developing his idea in the hope that at some point a suitable site and client would come along.
The Frühlicht article together with Mies’s surviving drawings helped keep the design alive in people’s minds. The drawings are dramatic and impressive, especially a gigantic one (68 × 48in/173 × 122cm) that was so big that, when the architect left Nazi Germany to move to the USA, in 1938, he was unable to take it with him. In the post-war period, the drawing began to be widely published in architectural books and magazines, and, in 1964, Mies was able to get it back from East Germany. It was exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and has been widely published and exhibited since then, becoming a favourite image for architects to study. By this time, the idea of a glass-clad skyscraper was no longer so revolutionary. In the 1950s and 1960s, it had become normal for tall buildings to have large expanses of glass and thin ‘curtain walls’. Mies’s Friedrichstrasse Tower is accepted as their most important ancestor.
