In 1908, four years before that photograph was taken of the dashing and impeccably attired young architect with his first clients, Mies’s transformation had been given a jolt forward, when he went to work for Peter Behrens. For young designers interested in a new approach, Behrens was Berlin’s leading architect. Walter Gropius, three years Mies’s senior, was also employed by him. Gropius and Mies first met in Behrens’s office.
It might have been a scene in a Balzac novel. When the young workman’s son from one of the toughest neighborhoods in Aachen met Gropius, he was instantly aware that, unlike him, this well-connected young man had everything a rising architect could have wanted. Gropius’s father served in the city administration as a building councilor; his great-uncle had been a distinguished architect in the tradition of Schinkel. Besides having designed important public buildings and private villas, Martin Gropius had headed the Berlin School of Arts and Crafts, where Mies had briefly been a student. Walter Gropius had gone to the finest schools and served in the Wandsbeck Hussars—among the most glamorous of Germany’s cavalry regiments—whereas poor Mies had been nothing but a low-level soldier, and only for a brief period. When he went to work for Behrens, Gropius had just returned to his native Berlin from a thrilling year in Spain; Mies had never enjoyed a day without obligations. Mies assumed that the well-born, confident Gropius was not even paid by Behrens, even though he had a high-level job. Mies himself received a pittance.
Then, in 1910, Gropius, who was more bent on industrial streamlined form than was Mies, went off to work on his own. Mies, who did not even have an architecture degree, certainly could not afford to do the same. The groundwork was laid for a competitiveness and antipathy that would only intensify with time.
AFTER A YEAR in Behrens’s office, tensions between Mies and another young architect escalated to such a point that the two could no longer remain in the same place; since the other man had seniority, Mies had to leave. Following a hiatus of about a year, he returned. By then, his new social circumstances were forcing him to comport himself in such a way that his rough edges were concealed from everyone except for his intimates. His first clients, the Riehls, had some friends, the Bruhns, also a worldly and prosperous family, and the Bruhns had a daughter, Ada. The prospect of an alliance with an affluent, well-connected woman from Berlin was very much to Mies’s liking, and he began to pursue Ada Bruhn.
Ludwig Mies in the doorway of the Riehl house, ca. 1912. It was hard to believe that the impeccably dressed young man who had ascended to the upper echelons of Berlin society had, only a few years earlier, been running from the police in the town where he was doing construction work.
His improved social position had in the meantime gained him entry into a milieu that would enable him to forge into new territory with his architectural work. Mies was taken along one evening to the home of a second important client for a private house, Hugo Perls, a successful lawyer and collector of contemporary art. Perls, who regularly hosted soirées for the leading intellectuals of the day, was pleased to meet a young architect who was so different from others in the strength and clarity of his passion for clear and elegant design. The young architect explained to Perls in few words why he eschewed ornament and would avoid the usual vestiges of classical motifs most rich people expected on their houses. Mies was not blind to the past—he revered the strength of the nineteenth-century designer Schinkel, whose bold structures dotted Berlin—but he craved a simplicity that no one else dared imagine.
Hugo Perls’s unpublished reminiscence of his first encounter and subsequent meetings with Mies provides a vivid portrait:
After many experiences in old, more recent, and new art we returned to Berlin in the hot summer. Our small apartment under the roof, in the midst of the forest, had been furnished by mother and sister. We had only to unpack the cases with our treasures from Paris and to hang Picasso’s paintings on the wall. In the exhibition of the Secession we quickly bought Munch’s Bathing Men.
Soon there was activity in our attic. Artists came, one introduced another. One evening Ludwig Mies van der Rohe appeared. …Van der Rohe did not talk much; the few things he said, however, seemed right and were easily understood. Something like a new era had come about in building. Better architects were already trying to keep away from façades, useless ornaments, angles, bay windows, and all the glue-on romanticism. A new classicism came into existence, and there was much talk about “decency” in building after Henry van de Velde had introduced morals into construction. What was being built was already less horrid than the usual, boastful architecture under William II. Van der Rohe’s convictions were sharp. If I remember correctly he explained the way of building a new house about so: “The architect has to become acquainted with the people who will live in the future house. All the major factors are easily derived from their wishes. Situation, direction, and the terrain, of course, play an important part in the final outcome of the blueprint. If all these are taken into account, the ‘how’ of the exterior follows organically.” We spoke about the functions of the parts of the house, although the rather dogmatic word “functionalism” perhaps did not exist. …
Deep in the forest, near the “Krumme Lanke,” he built our house. My too conservative mind led to many a friendly fight. The house could have been still better, for Mies van der Rohe was one of the founders of the new architecture.5
The blocklike house Mies made in Grunewald for the Perlses paid subtle homage to the past, but with its plaster facing devoid of decoration and its simple symmetrical plan, it was on the way to an unprecedented minimalism.
WENDING HIS WAY in the world of architecture, Mies was aided by the charm he worked on women. Peter Behrens was designing a large house in Holland for A. G. Kröller, a wealthy man who left most of the decisions about anything to do with art, which he collected in great quantity, and architecture to his wife, Helene E. L. J. Müller. Behrens had made Mies his main liaison to Kröller-Müller, as she was known. It wasn’t long before the rich and discerning Kröller-Müller began to prefer the young architect’s ideas to Behrens’s. One of Mies’s suggestions was that it would be worthwhile to consult with the Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage. He raised this idea to Behrens, who disagreed. The acid-tongued Mies responded by suggesting that Behrens was deceiving himself. Again, Mies seemed on the verge of physical battle with an employer. A furious Behrens “would have liked nothing better than to give me one in the face,” he later observed.6
Ludwig Mies, Perls house, Berlin, 1912. While he had not yet broken free from tradition, in his first houses for wealthy clients, Mies was already simplifying form and avoiding gratuitous details.
Mies was again out of a job. But following his abrupt departure from Behrens’s office, Kröller-Müller put him in charge of her house. She gave him an office in The Hague, where he worked surrounded by some fifty major paintings by Van Gogh. It was unlike anything he had ever imagined.
Having previously championed Berlage, Mies now wanted the project entirely for himself. The Dutch architect, however, was already on board because of Mies’s earlier intervention. Mies’s previous choice now became his main rival.
Mies made a design that combined elements of a Greek temple with the details of a modern factory. It was classical in its configuration and entry portico of parallel perpendicular columns, but industrial in its flat roof and unadorned surfaces. Mies immediately realized he would have to work as hard promoting his concept as he had creating it. Seeking effective endorsement, he went to Paris to show it to the critic Julius Meier-Graefe. Meier-Graefe’s views had great sway, and he wrote the letter of Mies’s dreams. If only it had arrived at A. G. Müller’s office sooner, it might have secured the young man the commission. But before Meier-Graefe’s letter was on Müller’s desk, H. P. Bremmer, a critic Müller had hired to help him make the best decision, had prevailed on Berlage’s behalf. Mrs. Kröller-Müller implored her husband to use Mies, however.
The result was a stalemate. For the time being, nothing came of either proposal. The Kröller-Müllers were so incapable of making a mutually agreeable decision that it was not until 1938 that they had their villa, from a different design.
Mies would make sure that nothing of the sort ever happened again.