Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had been offered the directorship of the Bauhaus when Gropius resigned in the spring of 1928. It was only after Mies declined the invitation to go to Dessau that Gropius replaced himself with Hannes Meyer.
Meyer’s directorship wreaked havoc on the school. Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and Herbert Bayer all quickly resigned in frustration with this man who opposed individual experimentation in deference to his Marxist agenda. Meyer’s main interest was functional architecture achieved by group consensus. In 1929, Schlemmer also quit the faculty, and while Albers, Kandinsky, and Klee stayed on, they all felt that the art they most cared about, painting, was becoming less and less significant at the Bauhaus.
In the summer of 1930, the City Council of Dessau notified Meyer that they were terminating his contract. According to the court proceedings, the reason was the city administration’s “concern for a situation brought on by the abuse of the intellectually political aims of Mr. Meyer for party-political agitation, which would have endangered the continued existence of the Bauhaus.” Meyer graciously submitted his resignation prior to the end of the period for which he was contractually allowed to remain, so that Mayor Hesse could appoint his successor, but he published an open letter to Hesse that appeared in the Berlin magazine Das Tagebuch, where he wrote:
Herr Oberbürgmeister! You are attempting to rid the Bauhaus, so heavily infected by me, of the spirit of Marxism. Morality, property, manners, and order are now to return once more hand in hand with the Muses. As my successor you have had Mies van der Rohe prescribed for you and not—according to the statutes—on the advice of the Masters. My colleague, poor fellow, is now expected to take his pickax and demolish my work. … It looks as if this atrocious materialism is to be fought with the sharpest weapons and hence the very life to be beaten out of the innocently white Bauhaus box. …I see through it all.”17
When Mayor Hesse approached Mies, he was intentionally choosing a Bauhaus director who had the strength of character to cope with the maelstrom. Aligned with no political party and focused on abstract design, coming from the outside, used to holding his ground in taxing conditions, Mies was the best possible choice.
Mies’s achievement in Barcelona had already made him well-known at the Bauhaus. I know that Anni and Josef Albers went to Barcelona on their trip to Biarritz and San Sebastian, and were deeply impressed. It seems likely that Klee and Bayer, with whom the Alberses met up in the Basque country, also detoured at the international exposition that summer; besides being of great interest, Barcelona was one of the places where they might have changed trains on their way to the Atlantic coast at the juncture of southern France and northern Spain. Even those Bauhaus masters and students who had not seen the actual building were enthralled by the newspaper and magazine photos. Mies was a regular visitor to Dessau; some of the masters knew him personally, and all were inspired by his work. Whatever Mies’s drawbacks were, most of the students and faculty in Dessau were delighted when, following the troubled stewardship of Hannes Meyer, one of the most accomplished and widely recognized architects in the world took the helm of the school.
That its new director epitomized the acceptance of modernism in the halls of power could only help in the Bauhaus’s perpetual struggle to garner government support and forge connections with industry. Those people who had flocked through the exhibition in Barcelona had, for the most part, responded favorably to Mies’s elegant juxtaposition of sheer planes of marble and glass, and to his use of shimmering chrome. Mies’s work might be more costly and blatantly luxurious than most Bauhaus design, but he knew what it took to expand the audience for unadorned form and for technically advanced design.
Hesse was content to replace the Meyer regime with someone who not only functioned so effectively in the world but was the image of propriety and order. Occasionally Mies switched from a bowler to a homburg, and he could be a dandy, donning spats and a monocle, but, given the tense crosscurrents of German society in 1930, it seemed better to have the face of the Bauhaus be a director who flaunted his elegance than one who was conspicuously left-wing.
LIKE MANY PROSPEROUS BERLINERS of the time, Mies had become overweight. This was true to such a degree that one Bauhaus student observed, “When you see from the distance two men approaching, and nearer to you there is only one man, you will be sure it is Mies.”18 The impression of his size was accentuated by his imposing personality.
But the man who was so large in physique and myth, and who had designed new thrones for the even larger king and queen of Spain, had other sides. Confident people did not find him intimidating, and he restored a degree of calm to the Bauhaus, to the extent possible given the political turmoil outside the school. In March 1932, well into Mies’s reign, Josef Albers wrote his friends Franz and Friedel Perdekamp, “The new director, Mies van der Rohe, that is, he’s been here almost two years, is a splendid chap. He has time, is not loud, and has made work the first principle again.” Albers acknowledged, nonetheless, that the spirit of Weimar was gone. “However,” he continued, “the pleasant neighborliness we had has disappeared, though that is not his fault.”19
Albers greatly enjoyed the nightly walks he took with Mies and Kandinsky. He and Mies were just about the same age, and came from similar backgrounds and the same part of the world. The students and younger faculty, however, had a harder time with the new Bauhaus director. The cold eyes beneath the rigid brim of his bowler stared in a way that discomfited some. Mies’s jaw, which seemed to be made of the same steel that supported his architecture, was locked in a set position; his conversational manner was fairly tense.
As for his family, by the time he was directing the Bauhaus, Mies visited his three daughters only once a year. In 1931, they and Ada relocated from the Bavarian Alps—she had completed her psychoanalysis—to Frankfurt. Even though the move put them nearer to Dessau, the physical proximity did not compensate for the father’s increased emotional distance.
WHILE THE POLITICIANS and senior faculty were pleased, younger people were not. Shortly after Mies arrived, the students took over the school cafeteria to show their discontent over Meyer’s dismissal. They demanded that Mies, who was staying aloof in his office, meet with them. Mies’s response was to have the Dessau police evict the students, after which the mayor closed the school and Mies took the further step of having the entire student body, not just the radicals, expelled.
The students all had to reapply to the Bauhaus, and agree to his new rules once they were readmitted. In the eyes of the administration, the draconian measures succeeded: all but twenty of the two hundred former pupils compliantly came on board. Nonetheless, the Bauhaus was clearly losing its utopian aura. This was when Paul Klee resigned.
Mies’s work, however, had a favorable impact on those students and faculty who remained at the school. At this time he designed a house in Guben, a historic market town in what was then East Brandenburg and is today southwestern Poland, right at the German border. It showed a softer, immensely appealing side of his architecture. In a garden that is a precise composition of brick walkways and terraces framing the regularized verdure, Mies had incorporated the qualities of the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch into modern architectural design. This house, for Erich Wolf, made clear the architect’s eye for domestic scale. He manipulated the bricks with the care that would have been accorded them in a bourgeois courtyard, even as he organized them with the clean brush of modernism.
The more one looks at the Wolf house garden, the more one sees its benefits. The depths of the shallow steps invite slow entrances and exits: the modest low balconies prompt meditation. One feels a call for motion and also for full stops. Art is a Zen-like experience: serene and calm while remaining active, and deeply felt. Architecture here inspires slow and steady breathing in and breathing out, and invites the viewer to imbibe the light and shadows gradually. Where Mies has turned a course of bricks, he has done so with utmost precision and care; nothing is left to chance.
This poetry, and the opting for control as well as maximum avoidance of hazard and risk, was a significant issue for the Bauhauslers. Josef Albers, for example, despised a lot of what had occurred in the art of the time because of Marcel Duchamp’s influence; he and most of his Bauhaus colleagues thought it was the artist’s task to impose order, not to embrace disorder or chance. Yet they were not control freaks. They let the rain weather the bricks, and treated the movement of the leaves, even the occasional drip of paint, as valuable determinants of the end results. The true representatives of the Bauhaus ideals were master organizers, and they carefully orchestrated what they did, all the while remaining completely open to playfulness—to the pizzicato. Albers used to say that he worked and worked and worked on his color choices, then threw his hands up in the air and thanked God; Mies’s garden for the Wolfs has that same openness to events beyond human control.
While he was running the Bauhaus, Mies also made a number of plans for sunken courtyards. Intended only for moments of gentle socializing or repose, these were places without immense usefulness or practical function. The architect was deliberately reviving a tradition that has existed in various cultures, and that in China goes back to the Han dynasty (third century B.C. to the third century A.D.). His designs followed the idea of the Hu-t’ung Avenue houses in Beijing in which the courtyard, rather than being at the center of a residence, is closer to the street, from which it is separated by a wall that is a continuation of an external wall of the house.
There is a brazen honesty to this architecture in which the support structure, with its load-bearing elements, is distinct from the curtain walls. There is also a clear affection for nature in the way that inside and outside penetrate and the raw elements and shelter coexist in happy tandem. Everything is rendered beautiful, however, whether it serves to support the building or is an embellishment. Mies believed that nothing in life needed to be ugly to look at. This embodied the essential attitudes of the greatest of the Bauhauslers. Everything—a pair of socks, an extension cord—could exert its magic.
ONCE MIES WAS in Dessau, he and Lilly Reich lived together in an apartment, and she took the helm of the weaving workshop. Ludwig Hilbersheimer, second in command under Mies, also had a wife who was far away, while his mistress, Otti Berger, served as Reich’s assistant. Reich and Mies were at the Bauhaus only three days a week; otherwise, they lived in Berlin, and he ruled in absentia. But he was having such an impact on world architecture, and was so effective in Dessau, that he was given the leeway.
Adding to Mies’s luster in the world, the year he became the Bauhaus director he completed, for a sophisticated couple in Czechoslovakia, a sleek modern palace that redefined luxury. Like Le Corbusier in France, Mies was proving that opulence could not merely have a contemporary look, but could even suggest the future. This was a change from the usual practice of having mansions for the rich invoke the past. Most luxurious residences deliberately echoed Versailles and the schloss of the eighteenth century, or Tudor and Georgian country houses; the goal of their design was not so much aesthetic refinement as an implicit link to landed gentry and to a sense of entitlement and social superiority. Le Corbusier and Mies not only transformed the aesthetics with which privileged people would live; they invoked a radically different value system.
Like the Barcelona Pavilion, the house Mies designed for Fritz and Grete Tugendhat on the outskirts of Brno gave unprecedented voice to the beauty of functional forms—undisguised radiator pipes, frankly welded joints—and evoked a richness in unadorned materials previously considered beyond the pale. This was the place for which Mies designed what would become the best-known coffee table of the twentieth century: a simple X-shaped base made from four bar angles and an unframed glass top.
Almost as familiar today is the dining room chair, known as the Brno chair, that Mies put into the house. At the Bauhaus, and to the audience that was growing for his work worldwide, Mies’s name was identified with a philosophy of “less is more.” It is impossible to imagine how a seat, chair back, and arms could be arranged more minimally or more eloquently then in the Brno chair.
PHILIP JOHNSON was a dinner guest at the Tugendhat house shortly after it was built. While not yet an architect, the American visitor was an unpaid director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the recently formed Museum of Modern Art and hence one of the key figures involved in disseminating information about the Bauhaus in America. Because people from all over the world went to New York City to discover what was happening in culture internationally, Johnson’s admiration for the Bauhaus would have vital echoes. Describing the Tugendhat house, he praised “the exquisite perfection of details” and “a scrupulousness unparalleled in our day.”20
The Tugendhat house was constructed at the edge of a fairy-tale landscape of crenellated castles perched on jagged mountains, and old churches that are all curve and fantasy. Its apparent severity was not unknown to the Bauhauslers; Gropius’s villas, as well as a lot of other housing by the architects whose work was included at Weissenhof, were in the same vein. But it still presented a startling and powerful alternative to the Baroque and Jugendstil styles that dominated contemporary domestic architecture.
Fritz Tugendhat had grown up in houses where antimacassars were the order of the day, but Grete Tugendhat said her husband had “a horror of the doilies and knickknacks that overloaded every room” of his childhood homes. They both craved “clear and simple forms.”21 By picking Mies as their architect, not only did they get chairs of unadorned leather and steel, but the ornament in their house was nil, the sight lines uncluttered. The Tugendhats endorsed Mies’s pioneering notions of beauty, reevaluating what was appropriate as a source of household materials and what it took to make a home elegant. The young Czech couple were delighted to inhabit a setting as efficient and unembellished as the latest manufacturing machine. At the same time, they created a residence for themselves and their children as refined, as poetic, as rich in certain elements, as the palaces of earlier eras.
THEIR HOUSE was a wedding present from Grete Tugendhat’s father, among the richest men in Brno in the 1920s. He had given her the sloping site overlooking Brno, with a commanding view of cathedral steeples and the turrets of Spielberg castle. She had admired the open spaces, as well as the large glass doors that separated the living room from the garden, in the house of Edward Fuchs in Berlin, and had asked the name of the architect. Learning it was Mies van der Rohe, she arranged a meeting.
From the start, according to Grete Tugendhat, the Tugendhats knew they “were in the same room with an artist.” Mies and the people in his Berlin office, from which he commuted to Dessau, had one radical idea after another, and the Tugendhats accepted them all. Years later, Mies would recall that the Tugendhats—Fritz more than Grete—gave him a hard time and initially resisted each new concept, but those reminiscences are considered largely inaccurate, intended mainly to enhance his own glory.
In keeping with the site, Mies put the top floor, which contained the bedrooms and nursery, at street level. The court in front of it leads to a wraparound balcony, which in turn connects on both ends with a terrace on the other side facing the view. Inside the entrance hall are steps that lead down to the lower level—a vast open space in which all that separates the living room, dining room, and library are two freestanding walls, one curved and one flat. These rooms, mostly sheathed in glass, open to the lawn and the city.
That large, continuous living/dining area, fifty by eighty feet, is punctuated by cross-shaped columns made by the joining of four L-beams encased in chrome. Similar to those Mies used in the Barcelona Pavilion, they help support the building. What gives the house its structure is also a source of beauty. Plainly visible horizontal slats are handsome evidence of one of the first air-conditioning systems in Europe, for which the air was initially blown from ice stored in the basement. Heat comes through straightforward steel tubing. Modern technology is at the fore; the floor of the living/dining area is an expanse of white linoleum.
THERE WAS, however, no rule that everything had to be machine-made. The carpets, of natural wool, were woven by hand. Some of the materials are quite fine and exotic. The flat wall was tawny gold and white onyx from Algeria; draperies were Swedish linen and black and beige raw silk. White velvet and Macassar ebony were abundant. The cantilevered chairs had lean lines that reflected the latest engineering advances and eschewed all decoration, but their coverings were of the finest pigskin and cowhide.
For these details, the past tense applies, for while the house still stands, it has mostly been gutted. But when the Tugendhats moved in, just as Mies became the director of the Bauhaus, the mix of natural abundance, human handwork, and modern technology was remarkable.
This respect for natural elements and the creation of exquisite and original objects, many of them one of a kind, was embraced at the Bauhaus. Even as Gropius had worked for the global spread of good design, artists like Klee, Kandinsky, and the Alberses were, first and foremost, in pursuit of sources of beauty and a feeling of wonder. Theory, concepts, and an aesthetic philosophy to be promulgated worldwide were less of an issue; a recapitulation of life’s marvels was the primary focus. Mies was the right person to forge ahead with that agenda of celebration.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Tugendhat house, 1928–30. The house Mies created for adventurous young patrons in the recently formed Czechoslovakia offered beautiful and unprecedented sights from every angle, inside and out.
Beauty might come in an expensive package—the Alberses would, at the end of their lives, love the leather upholstery of their Mercedes-Benz 240 SL—or it could be free and easy to find, as in the seashells Klee collected, the beach pebbles Josef Albers admired, and the tree bark Anni Albers cherished as one of the finest designs she had ever seen. Or beauty could be the result of mechanical effectiveness, as with Kandinsky’s beloved racing bicycle, which he was pleased to have Gabriele Münter return to him when he was in Dessau. It could be natural and readily accessible, like the trees Klee studied every day during his strolls in the parks of Weimar and Dessau, or exotic like the tropical fish Klee kept in his aquarium. It could be sensuous in its impact, as it was for Gropius from the moment he began to fall sway to the allure of women as a young man in Spain, and to develop a connoisseur’s attraction to the opposite sex. Beauty might also be new and experimental, like Kandinsky’s paintings and Stravinsky’s music, or ancient and in a humble peasant style, like the folk art furniture Kandinsky adored. As at the Tugendhat house, the only requisite for visible form was that it be wonderful.
IN BRNO, Mies personally designed every detail: the heating pipes, the drapery track holders, the door handles, the wooden-slatted venetian blinds, the lighting fixtures. For the living and dining areas, he built large glass walls overlooking the city; they could be electrically raised and lowered in increments, allowing them to disappear completely if so desired. He arranged the furniture meticulously. There was a black pearwood dining table supported by a single X-sectioned column. Without its leaf, it allowed intimate dining for the Tugendhats and their three children; with the leaf in, up to twenty-four people could be seated in those Brno chairs.
Brno had an ancient past, but in 1930 it was also a thriving modern city. The head of the Czechoslovakian republic then was Tomás Masaryk, whose broad cultural viewpoint was the reason Josef Albers had been summoned to speak at a conference in Prague. In 1918, Masaryk had been elected the first president of the recently formed republic. He had attended grammar school in Brno, where he earned money by tutoring the family of a police chief. Early on, Masaryk had advocated the eight-hour workday and education for women. Having led Czechoslovakia to liberation from the Habsburg monarchy, he condemned oppression in any form, opposed outmoded relics of the past, and was sympathetic to all new ways of thinking, including the most recent developments in art and architecture. The Tugendhat house was built in a hospitable environment.
But the world soon changed. In 1931, the German magazine Die Form declared the Tugendhat house unlivable, an ostentatious showpiece more than a home. The Tugendhats defended their choices in a subsequent issue of the magazine, saying that the spaces gave them a new freedom, and that even if it was impossible to rearrange the furniture or hang pictures in the main living area, the wood graining and marble patterns offered great aesthetic richness and diversity.
They made this statement in an article titled “Can One Live in the Tugendhat House?” The participants in the discussion, besides Franz and Grete Tugendhat, included Ludwig Hilbersheimer and several writers on architecture. One critic, Justus Bier, attacked the open plan of the house, saying that it made privacy impossible, and protested the bold wood grain and powerful stone pattern of the walls and floors, insisting that they not only made it impossible to hang art, but also caused the architect’s presence to dominate that of the clients. Another critic, Roger Ginsburger, a Marxist, referred to “immoral luxury.”22
Grete Tugendhat said the house provided “an important feeling of existence.” The “large and austerely simple” rooms, she said, were “liberating” and had the effect of making one see “every flower in a different light” and causing people to “stand out more clearly against such a background.”23
This was the unifying Bauhaus wish: to intensify seeing. Alertness mattered in multiple realms; it was vital to see the possibilities of color and line, of thread, of the working of the psyche, of the visual aspects of sound, or of the impact of design on our lives.
Grete Tugendhat also credited the house with rhythms that provided “a very particular tranquility.”24 Visual occurrences were the source of emotional well-being.
IT WOULD TAKE MORE than words, however, to defend the Tugendhats’ way of life. What would happen in Brno, in the surprisingly near future, was to be the fate of so much of the physical legacy of the Bauhaus. The couple, who were Jewish, left Czechoslovakia in 1938, the year before the Third Reich entered. Soon thereafter, Albert Messerschmitt, the aircraft manufacturer, moved into the house. In 1944, as the Wehrmacht was falling apart on the eastern front, the Red Army took over. Mies van der Rohe’s biographer Franz Schulze writes: “The Russians rode their horses up and down the travertine garden staircase and roasted oxen on a spit in front of the onyx wall.”25 The curved ebony dining room wall was destroyed.
In postwar Czechoslovakia, the house fell into further disrepair. When I visited about twenty years ago, when it was still a challenge just to get a visa to an eastern bloc country, Brno had generally deteriorated after decades of bureaucratic Communist rule. Grim apartment blocks proliferated alongside remnants of Baroque glory. Although a new spirit was in the air, the city looked down-at-the-heels, as did the house. Between 1952 and 1985, local authorities had restored Mies’s masterpiece at a cost of six million crowns for the building and one million for the garden, but not all for the better.
The Tugendhats’ family home had become a guest house for official visitors to Brno, and parts of it were open to the public for guided tours on Saturday and Sunday. The building still had some of its old power, but the differences from photographs of the house in its original state were shocking. Not a stick of the original furniture remained. Recent Czechoslovakian art in low-priced frames hung here and there, and televisions were everywhere. An antenna on the roof of the house did no kindness to Mies’s pure and perfect form. A notice was taped to the curved entrance wall, now made of opaque plastic panels rather than the original milk glass, and leaks were visible in the ceiling. The only way to enter the garden was to jump the padlocked fence.
But it is no surprise that it was not possible, or desirable, for the Communist government to re-create the atmosphere of a private residence where seventeen servants once worked. Indeed, the idea of an onyx panel worth three million crowns is troublesome in a country where there has been such suffering. And even if it had not entirely honored the aesthetic of the Tugendhat house, the city of Brno had at least kept it alive. In spite of its deterioration, the onyx wall, and many other elements of the original house, made thrilling viewing.
Unable to reconstruct the floor-to-ceiling glass walls to their original appearance, the authorities in Brno had still managed to redo them with a seam, and they had the curved dining room wall rebuilt. The lawn needed seeding, and one longed for the garden on which Mies had carefully consulted, but at least the garden façade was intact and was still an exceptionally harmonic abstract composition. The intersection of machined planes at right angles—whether in outside details or in the travertine marble slabs over the radiators—remained a powerful form of modern beauty. The trees had grown higher than Mies might have wished, but visitors could still walk on a sweep of balcony and gaze at the castles and church towers.
I particularly relished the chance to sit on an extraordinary semicircular bench that typifies Mies’s eye and his imagination with materials. The bench, which echoes the shape of the dining room wall, is made of wood on cinder blocks with backing of stovepipe. The materials are rough, but the form is gentle. At his best, Mies van der Rohe could be exceedingly generous in his understanding of the need for grace and pleasantness in everyday life.
Moreover, the chrome-plated X-columns were still sculptural and functional at the same time, noble yet lighthearted. And given that the Barcelona Pavilion no longer stands, except in a reproduction, they provide an opportunity to relish one of the pavilion’s key features. Other original details—the wooden blinds, the frankly functional heating and air-conditioning systems—were also in evidence. And the onyx wall reflected and absorbed the setting sun with the bravura it had sixty years earlier. The travertine marble was still in the entrance hall. Few of Mies’s lighting fixtures remained, but one of his designs for a ceiling lamp had been reproduced in a number of rooms. Throughout the house, the ebony was remarkable. The bedroom doors, each almost eleven and a half feet high, dazzled with both their warmth and their scale.
What a unique and salubrious house this once was. There was still an enclosed winter garden. The library needed additional restoration and the correct furnishings, but at least its dramatic shelving was unchanged, and I could glimpse an adjoining space that gave great insight into the Tugendhats’ way of life: a small cubicle in which Fritz Tugendhat kept his business papers. He felt that such papers were unattractive in a home and should be out of sight. A library was for loftier purposes, and children should not concern themselves with money matters.
That degree of cultivation, and deference to a seamless style of everyday living, reflected the attitude that made Mies van de Rohe’s taste so ideal for his patrons. Refinement, dignity, and the mix of careful understatement with consummate luxury reached their apogee in the Tugendhat dwelling, where a young and forward-thinking couple gave an architect of such exceptional vision and courage the opportunity to have his full voice.
IN 1933, during a period when Mies was visiting the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin every other day in an effort to determine the fate of the Bauhaus, he was pleased that Kandinsky had raved to Galka Scheyer about the Tugendhat house to such an extent that he was asked to send photos of it to her in Hollywood, California. She, in turn, planned to show the images to an American collector, who presumably might want a similar dwelling.
Later in his life, however, Mies would not consider the Tugendhat house that important. In 1965, when the distinguished art critic Katharine Kuh interviewed him for the Saturday Review in his Chicago office, he remarked that “the Tugendhat House was considered outstanding, but I think only because it was the first modern house to use rich materials, to have great elegance. … I personally don’t consider the Tugendhat House more important than other works that I designed considerably earlier.”26
This was part of his attempt to rewrite history, to suggest that he had been a breakthrough modernist in the early 1920s, when in truth he was still designing relatively traditional houses for his clients at that time. The word “considerably” was part of a deliberate effort to put himself at the forefront. He shared with many other architects the wish to say “I did it first.” In fact, it took some of the inroads made thanks to the Bauhaus, and the acceptance accorded the pioneering villas constructed by Le Corbusier well in advance of Mies actually building (as opposed to just designing) truly modern structures, before Mies could do anything as bold as the Tugendhat house.
Nonetheless, this confident, optimistic, rhythmic assemblage of concrete, glass, and steel was a masterpiece of visual effects and rhythmic and textural richness. That Mies got to certain things a few years after other people, and even as the great era of modernism in Germany was already coming to an end, is important to our understanding of architectural history, but the quality of his achievement is unique. The timing of his stint at the Bauhaus, similarly, made him someone who furthered something that others had developed rather than that he initiated, but he did so with verve.