While Mies was making these groundbreaking designs, one of the hottest topics in Berlin was the Bauhaus. But for Mies, there was the Gropius problem. The stonecutter’s son from Aachen had not gotten over the way the former hussar had made him feel when they were both in Behrens’s office.
Mies’s antipathy to Gropius had grown all the stronger at the start of 1919, when Mies submitted his Kröller-Müller design to an exhibition Gropius was organizing that was to open at the end of March. Gropius’s show, which had the catchy title “Exhibition of Unknown Architects,” was to be the first exhibition of architecture following the armistice. Nearly fifty years later, Mies would still recall Gropius’s response to his submission, as if it had been said only the day before: “We can’t exhibit it; we are looking for something entirely different.”11
In 1921, Theo van Doesburg, a friend of Mies’s who was the leader of the Dutch de Stijl movement and one of the founders of G, had gone to Weimar in hopes of being hired to teach at the Bauhaus. When Gropius failed to appoint him, he stayed in the new German capital anyway, and taught privately. Meanwhile, Mies’s friend Werner Graeff, who at age nineteen had become a Bauhaus student, was making remarkable graphite and tempera drawings in Itten’s course—they look like a combination of Zen calligraphy and the paintings Franz Kline would make in America thirty years later—but Itten did not approve of his approach. Graeff left the school unhappily and studied with Van Doesburg instead. Hans Richter was also among Van Doesburg’s group of Bauhaus outsiders, and even if Mies did not subscribe to Richter’s political agenda, he considered the former dadaist a colleague. In the period when Van Doesburg was teaching at home in Weimar rather than at the Bauhaus, Mies, Graeff, Richter, and Van Doesburg often communicated about what they considered to be Gropius’s aesthetic fickleness.
Everything changed in 1923, however. That year, Gropius asked Mies to show some of his recent work in the great Bauhaus Exhibition. Mies could not resist the invitation. Models of the glass skyscraper and concrete office building, and a drawing of the concrete country house, went off to Weimar, where they were handsomely installed in the section of the show devoted to international architecture. Given their long if unspoken rivalry, the alliance between Gropius and Mies still felt tentative, but their relationship was improving.
THE PROJECTS MIES actually realized in the early 1920s were not nearly as radical in concept as his skyscrapers and brick and concrete country houses. But the houses he designed for his parents-in-law’s circle of friends had a bit of the spareness and boldness that were his ideal, even as these residences retained enough of a traditional tone so that their owners did not risk being socially ostracized. And a monument Mies built in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde cemetery in honor of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the martyrs to the German Communist party who had been killed in an uprising in 1919, was revolutionary in design in a way appropriate to Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s politics. Composed entirely of coarse bricks, their jagged edges bespeaking unmitigated toughness, this abstract sequence of blocks was like a resonant shout. Adorned with hammer and sickle emblazoned on a five-pointed star, the monument had a stridency that was unmistakable. We know it, however, only from photos; Mies’s brave reminder of Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s courage was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.
While Mies’s client base still consisted mainly of the Bruhns’ friends, he was living as if he were a bachelor. Ada and Dorothea, Marianne, and Waltraut moved around in Switzerland, although the girls would on occasion visit their father in Berlin. Sometimes their mother went along, sometimes the three sisters were on their own. And on his rare holidays, Mies would go to see them, initially in the French-speaking Swiss mountain town of Montana, and after that in the Swiss Engadine.
Then Ada, who loved the mountains but had to give up hiking because she developed a crippling anxiety about heights, finally moved them near Bozen, in the Italian part of the Tyrol. This became their home for long enough for her to undertake psychoanalysis. Her estranged husband had little patience for Freud and his methods, however. Mies himself appeared to avoid introspection; he just kept designing flawless buildings.
He was beginning to command important projects. As vice president of yet another important organization of modern architects and artists, the Deutscher Werkbund, Mies became, in the mid-1920s, artistic director of the Weissenhofsiedlung. This energetic undertaking on the outskirts of Stuttgart was to present the latest in residential architecture. There were to be houses by Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, J. J. P. Oud, and another half dozen or so of the most interesting European architects. Now it became Mies’s turn to do a favor for Gropius. As if in exchange for his own participation in the 1923 Bauhaus show, he not only included his former rival in the list of world-class architects who would create houses for Weissenhof, but gave Gropius one of the best building lots on which to do so. Not that Gropius was elevated to the top; Mies himself and their tough old boss Peter Behrens were doing entire apartment buildings.
This remarkable group of modern residences in a Stuttgart suburb remains to this day a pilgrimage spot for architecture enthusiasts, and Mies’s layout of the array of dwellings is part of the fascination. He had a difficult task; the overall site was narrow, irregular, and full of steep rises and drops. Mies did a spectacular job. He awarded Le Corbusier corner lots so that the Swiss architect’s two stunning villas command the site and announce the thrill of modernism to the approaching visitor. Their glistening white streamlined forms are endowed with lively rhythms and possessed by bravura without arrogance; Mies did well to place them like a signpost. And by locating Le Corbusier where he did, Mies also provided the Swiss with the chance to give the people inside the two villas a sweeping view of vineyards and fields and the distant horizon, fulfilling Le Corbusier’s dream of access to the sky and the forces of the universe.
Besides Gropius, who submitted a prefabricated house, there were other designers whom a lesser person would have excluded as rivals. But Mies showed professionalism and generosity in his approach. He organized the myriad buildings on that difficult spot of land with impressive concord. Their unifying factor was that every house had to be white and have a flat roof; otherwise, the individual designers were given great liberty. The buildings were meant to display both homogeneity and variety.
THE WAY MIES went about the Weissenhof project did not please everyone, however. He was notoriously slow—some would say passive-aggressive—about everything he did. He spent days laboring over the single paragraph he wrote for the exhibition catalogue, greatly irritating the editor. He waited until October 5, 1926, to invite Le Corbusier to participate in this undertaking for which the two villas needed to be completed by July 23 of the following year, which was strangely at odds with the way he then sited them in the premium position. It was Mies’s laboriousness that enabled him to perfect his work, but when its price imposed hardship on everyone in his orbit, there was a lot of displeasure.
Yet few people disagreed with the opinion that at Weissenhof Mies had organized something marvelous, with first-rate work. What might have been cold, with a stultified appearance of having emerged from the same mold, was full of variety. This was very much Mies’s intention; in the foreword over which he labored so long, he wrote, “I held it imperative to keep the atmosphere at Stuttgart free of one-sided and doctrinaire viewpoints.”12 As a group of buildings, Weissenhof, when it was completed, was without precedent. Everything was pared down, related by its whiteness and those planar roofs, and by its crispness and functionalism, yet the structures all maintained the particularities of their architects, and were jaunty and possessed of remarkable élan.
Mies’s own work at Weissenhoff had the authority and grandeur that were his alone. His four-story-high apartment house, a long rectangular slab dominating Weissenhof from its highest ridge, is magisterial. Mies had in common with some of his future colleagues at the Bauhaus a wish for his work not only to be effective in fulfilling its purpose, but also to demonstrate an understanding of materials. Yet what was even “more important” to him was for it to have a “spiritual quality.”13 He achieved this through visual tempo and the grace of the proportions.
The west façade of that large building is punctuated by an elegant grid of windows that is, the longer we study it, ever more astonishing. With each vertical rectangle of glass framed in black steel—and with a very subtle and judicious arrangement achieved by using, as an organizational tool, narrow vertical strips of the smooth white plaster—he establishes a precise beat. From left to right, the façade reads three/stop/one. Then there is a full break for the stairwell, followed by one/stop/three/stop/three/stop/four/stop/one. Then there is another stairwell; then comes one/stop/four/stop/three. At that point, following a brief halt, begins the mirror image of what the viewer has just seen.
One is left transfixed by this visual orchestration with its classical beat and tempo. The east façade, which sports balconies and openings for the roof gardens, is equally mesmerizing in its boldness. Klee’s hero was Mozart; Mies’s work conjures Beethoven.
Inside of Mies’s buildings, the apartments look both east and west, so the rooms are flooded with light. That luminosity animates the space so that for all of the balance, Mies’s architecture is always alive with movement. The turns of the stair rails have the grace of flawlessly executed ballet steps, adding further fluidity to the minimalism and inducing the “spiritual” effect Mies desired. As in a Zen rock garden, the visual becomes inexplicably religious.