While Mies was in Stuttgart working on Weissenhof, he lived in a small apartment with Lilly Reich. Reich, who was, like Ada, one year older than he was, designed textiles and women’s clothing. In 1914, she had run a fashion show put on by the Werkbund; it had been one of the last activities of the avant-garde design group in Berlin before the war ground things to a halt.
Reich’s own appearance conformed to the styles she put into that fashion show. She was always impeccably groomed, in a modern, manly way that was startling to many people, completely counter to the usual style of bourgeois women and the expectations of most men. She assiduously avoided the soft and frilly,14 not only in her appearance but also in her behavior.
While Weissenhof was open to the public, Reich was responsible for a concurrent exhibition in downtown Stuttgart that showed contemporary furniture and household objects. This was where Mies introduced his cantilevered “MR” side chair, a breakthrough in elegant minimalism. The skeleton of the “MR” is a continuous form of tubular steel that is like a drawing made in three-dimensional space. Everything necessary for a chair has been reduced to the bare essentials. The single line of steel establishes the base, legs (of which there are only two, through a feat of equilibrium), seat, and back. Mies calibrated each angle and proportion with utter precision. On the impeccable frame, two expanses of material—either leather or painted caning, depending on the customer’s preference—are stretched tautly to complete the seat and back.
In the history of armchairs, this was among the visually lightest to date. Mies’s sense of line and scale seem to have come from the angels. The curve that creates the base, the seat, and the back is scrolled as if with a magical wand; its opposite number, which further cradles the back, turns for arms, and flows downward until it attaches itself at the perfect point on the legs for effective bracing, completes the exquisite assemblage in a way that guarantees visual pleasure as well as the physical well-being of the sitter. Not only had Mies van der Rohe revolutionized the concept of armchair, but he had transformed the possibilities of matter, making strong substances ethereal.
Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Although he never divorced his wife, who was the mother of his three daughters, Mies lived openly with the opinionated and imperious Lilly Reich, who shared his views on how people should present themselves.
By offering this chair for sale at the pivotal moment when enthusiasts of modern design from all over the world were descending on Stuttgart, Reich proved herself the perfect colleague. She and Mies had the same taste in design, and they both ascribed utmost importance to the presentation of one’s self—in comportment, speaking manner, and appearance. When they continued to live together back in Berlin, they reinforced each other’s stridency on these issues. Mies’s daughters came from the Swiss mountains to visit, and Reich immediately let the girls know in no uncertain terms that the clothing in which their mother had dressed them would not do. While using their mother’s family’s money, to which Mies still had limited access even as its buying power dwindled with inflation, Reich clad them according to her own preference for what was more austere in style and considerably more expensive than anything they had ever owned before.
The girls quickly came to feel as if their father’s mistress was a cold and disapproving stepmother. They were well brought up and polite, but they disliked her intensely. Mies’s reaction was to put even more distance between himself and his children.
To outside observers, the relationship between Mies and Reich depended on her slavish devotion to him. Reich fit in perfectly with the world Mies was designing. Her smart dresses, streamlined hair, and assured speaking manner epitomized rationalism and control while eschewing sentiment. Each of the geniuses at the Bauhaus had a companion who provided vital support, but Mies’s was the only one who offered the flattery of which imitation is said to be the highest form. Everything she did was done in a disciplined, authoritarian way.
IN JULY 1928, Mies van der Rohe was commissioned to design the German Pavilion for a great international exhibition opening in Barcelona. Having forced Le Corbusier to rush his houses for Weissenhof, now he was in the same predicament; the structure needed to be completely ready for the opening of the exhibition by the king and queen of Spain the following May. If it had taken him half a year to write a paragraph, now he had to create and completely construct a major building in ten months.
The result of that breakneck process had rare grace and equipoise. And it had the highest degree of finish imaginable.
The lithe, elegant façade of the Barcelona Pavilion was nothing but a thin rectangular wall of travertine marble blocks aligned so that the graining of the marble achieves a musical flow. A flat white roof was perched lightly on top with an overhang that was like a long continuous eyebrow. Those two forms dominated the structure, yet there was nothing “dominant” here; rather, there was a sense of perfectly related elements juxtaposed in total harmony. The thin and graceful chromed entrance columns, which in cross-section were X-shaped, and the refined half flight of entrance steps incised at a right angle into the sloping terrain, had the same elegance and quiet strength as the marble façade and lithe roof. Inside, Mies had inserted a nonbearing wall between two bearing walls; this breakthrough in building design gave birth to the open plan he had developed but not executed in his country house designs. As Mies explained late in his life, “One evening as I was working late on that building I made a sketch of a free standing wall, and I got a shock. I knew that it was a new principle.”15
The components, inside and out, were delicately interwoven so that there was a balance of mass and lightness. The furniture was powerful, but it was installed sparely and with ample space around it. White and black, vertical and horizontal: the contrasts played off one another with perfect equilibrium. Yet there was no suggestion whatsoever of an underlying formula; if the system had been visible, it might have diminished the viewer’s response. Rather, the flawless proportions seemed to have grown as naturally as those of a rosebush.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, view of principal façade of German Pavilion, Barcelona, 1928–29. With its unprecedented grace and eloquent use of fine materials, the Barcelona Pavilion was well-known and admired at the Bauhaus.
Working on the Barcelona Pavilion, Mies willingly responded to the exigencies of the situation, letting them determine the end results, just as Anni Albers let the capabilities as well as the limitations of the medium of thread guide her design of textiles. He had very little time to construct the building, and he was constrained by the season; he knew he could not move the large pieces of marble he desired from the quarry “in the winter because it is still wet inside and it would freeze to bits.”16 Yet he did not want to use brick, the most likely alternative. So he went to a marble depot, where he found onyx blocks that he used as a module, making the pavilion double the height of a single block.
Even when seen only in vintage photographs, the Barcelona Pavilion fills viewers with the sense of well-being that occurs when something has such perfect grace that its ambient rightness enters us. The rich quietude, the clarity without pomp, directly affect our breathing. A sculpture of a female nude by Georg Kolbe, rising gracefully from a shallow pool in front, adds both the perfect humanistic touch and a welcome resting point for the eye amid all the reflections in glass and chrome. Refined to the nth degree yet totally robust, this new form of beauty that Mies invented induces true tranquillity at the same time that it energizes us.
Mies used light as an element at the Barcelona Pavilion; shadows and reflections played a major role in the visitor’s experience. With the Kolbe sculpture installed near the entrance, the structure also had a completely human element along with its machined perfection.
IT WAS FOR the flowing reception space in the Barcelona Pavilion that Mies designed the lounge chairs and accompanying ottomans that today proliferate worldwide. The capacious seats now exist in reproductions that range from costly authorized renditions of the originals to poorly made rip-offs, and they are seen in building lobbies, offices, and private residences over much of the globe. They became known quickly, and whereas most of the designs of the Bauhaus furniture workshop were seen by, at best, a dozen people, what Mies made for a large public exhibition in Barcelona received international publicity right away. That success was proof to people at the Bauhaus that the larger world was ready for modernism.
Yet even as the streamlined form of Mies’s elegant Barcelona chairs was admired at the Bauhaus and fulfilled the goals of being ornament-free and using current technology, these pieces of furniture did not represent the values of every Bauhausler. Anni Albers summed up the problem in a word when she said, grimacing, that Mies furniture was “fancy.” The leather and chrome were too much the materials of her uncle’s Hispano-Suiza, and there was the problem of weight. Mies’s chairs were very heavy. This meant that they were awkward to move and costly to ship, which was contrary to the ideals of a lot of Bauhaus design. They were also expensive. And, beyond all that, they were built for royalty, not for the population at large.
The Barcelona chairs were meant to serve as thrones for King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenie when the pavilion opened. As such, they put an ancient idea, laden with tradition, into a totally new form. They may have been intended for monarchical ceremonials, but they threw away every notion of ornament. Where once there might have been brocade or damask, now there was white leather, quilted to hold its position; because of its whiteness, the leather seemed to be more pure and less animal-like than it would have in its natural color. Where the support structure might previously have been laden with carving and gilded to excess, now it was lean and refined, dependent on the tensile strength of metal and the reflective qualities of chrome, formed impeccably into graceful, sloping X’s.
But for all those breakthroughs, this furniture was not meant for the people of every societal rank who were the Bauhaus’s intended clients. The other drawback of the chairs was one they shared with their designer: they presented themselves with great finesse, but had a certain coldness.
Nonetheless, when he became director of the Bauhaus the year after many of its luminaries visited Barcelona to study his work, Mies would give the school a much-needed stability in dire circumstances. Behind his façade, there was considerable humanity, and the strength to uphold important values.