Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Bruhn was a successful manufacturer and inventor. He owned factories all over Europe, as far away as London, and had invented both the meters that were used in Berlin’s taxis and an altimeter that became standard in airplanes used by the German air force. He was known to bear down hard on his children yet also to spoil them in the extreme, and when Mies met Bruhn’s daughter Ada, she was a highly complicated individual, given to episodes of neurotic illness. Tall, with long brown hair she wore in a chignon, Ada was also striking in appearance. Already a dignified upper-class lady, Mies’s future wife was more than a year older than he was.
Ada was a student in a Dresden suburb, Hellerau, where she was studying eurhythmics with the composer and musicologist Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. Jaques-Dalcroze had a profound influence on many of the most advanced proponents of modern dance and music, among them Le Corbusier’s brother, Albert Jeanneret. Ada may have belonged to the upper stratum of Berlin society, but she was also an adventuress. She lived with the modern dancer Mary Wigman and another woman, Erna Hoffmann, who would marry Hans Prinzhorn, a well-known psychiatrist who would write The Art of Psychotics.
From the start, Bruhn and Mies made a fascinating pair. He came from a completely different rung of society, but he exuded the confidence and savoir faire she lacked. With his strong square jaw, chiseled nose, and bright hazel-green eyes, he also had movie-actor good looks. His shock of silky black hair, combed straight back to make his forehead look as precisely geometric as the forms he advocated for building design, added to his impact. Ada was also striking, but the impression she gave was of deep thoughtfulness tinged with uneasiness.
Ada had already been engaged, to the great art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who was twenty-one years older than she was. She was attracted to intelligence and originality in men as in music and dance. What lured Mies to her was a different matter. Dorothea, the second of the three daughters born to Mies and Ada told me, many years ago, “My father was nothing but a social climber, nothing whatsoever.” Ada offered not only wealth, but also further entrée into the world Mies had already begun to penetrate although he was still an outsider.
Ada was sufficiently neurotic that her family was pleased enough that she was ending up with someone who worked hard and was clearly motivated and industrious. The only aspect of Mies her parents disliked was his name. “Mies” on its own had an unfortunate sound, and in German slang translates, roughly, as “crummy” or “rotten.” But for the time being the Bruhns kept their protests quiet.
The bride’s parents gave the pair a proper Lutheran wedding and set them up in a nice house in one of Berlin’s most affluent suburbs. The year was 1913, and Mies, who had started his own office the previous year, now had more prospects for clients in need of fancy houses. But then the young architect was again drafted into the army. Because he did not have a university degree, he became a noncommissioned soldier of low rank, and went off to fight in Romania.
DURING THE WAR YEARS and immediately afterward, Mies and Ada produced three daughters. Mies, however, wanted a son. He therefore used boys’ nicknames, complete with the masculine pronoun, for two of the girls. Dorothea became “der Muck,” and Marianne became “der Fritz.” Only Waltraut got off easy—as “Traudl.”
Once he returned from his military service, Mies again enjoyed the benefits of being married to a rich woman. Ada, assisted by a governess, freed him of any obligations of fatherhood. He designed large and luxurious private houses, with Ada’s parents’ circle of friends as his clients. The bulk of the money that supported his way of life came from his wife’s father, but as the man in the family, he was in charge of it. There was enough so that Mies could practice architecture independently and take up skiing and horseback riding in his spare time.
He was not yet as committed to modernism as he would later have people believe. The houses he designed were less ornate than many being built in Berlin’s wealthy suburbs, but even if they lacked ornate façades and crenellated parapets, they were not out of keeping with the style of other rich people’s mansions. Later in life, hoping to redesign history and keep people from realizing how traditional he had once been, Mies would instruct a subordinate in his office, Sergius Ruegenburg, to burn his papers from this period.7 That revisionism, which began in the mid-1920s, would continue, but in the years right after the world war, even as the Bauhaus was being founded, Mies was very content to fit into his new milieu and to live and design according to its rules.