As a teacher at the Dessau Bauhaus, Mies worked only with advanced students. He started them out with the seemingly simple task of designing “a single-bedroom house facing a walled garden.”27 Then he had them try to perfect their schemes, repeatedly telling them to go back to their drawing boards to improve their work.
This class for half a dozen students was the first teaching Mies had done anywhere. He was far from gentle. Two of the students, Hermann Blomeier and Willi Heyerhoff, who had attended architecture school together in Holzminder, where both had been highly successful, showed Mies some plans they had made there. Howard Dearstyne, another of the group of six, reported that “Mies rode roughshod over them, marking them up with a black pencil to indicate how they should have been done.”28 The two students were so upset that they did not return to the class for a month.
Mies’s general response to whatever the students did was “try it again.”29 He spoke in a quiet voice, but he was emphatic. On that first simple project, he had the future architects work and rework the details for months before allowing them to proceed to the larger structure they were dreaming of.
Mies articulated his own goals as an educator. “You can teach students how to work; you can teach them technique—how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions—of order.” That teaching, he believed, would enable the student “to reach their potential, and this differs, of course, for each student.” On this last point he was adamant: “But the different potentials are not the teacher’s problem. … Some students you simply cannot teach.”30 He did not care about people as much as about architecture; he had decided that only a few good students were needed to make good architecture everywhere, and therefore his only concern was to develop the most gifted pupils.
“I thought a lot and I controlled my thoughts in my work—and I controlled my work through my thoughts,” he declared of his own approach.31This gave him license to speak as little as he wanted. One of his former students said that when one asked Mies a question, “he simply would not respond. If you pressed him he was likely to get quite ill-tempered about it. … I’m not talking about questions that were asked spitefully, but serious questions. He simply would brush them aside.”32
That same abruptness came through in an interview Mies granted late in his life to six college students. “Some people think our problem is the human situation today, but that is a general problem. That is not an architectural problem.” Mies was deliberately taking a stand opposite to that of Le Corbusier, with whom he felt a rivalry, and who maintained that architecture was “in the service of mankind.” Crusty to the point of nastiness, Mies was emphatic about his belief that rationalism and intelligence could be applied to all problems, and were more important than personal responses. He amplified on the idea that “the human situation” was not the concern of architecture: “You can prove something logical by reason. You cannot prove feelings. Everyone has emotions and this is the hell of our time. Everyone says they have a right to their opinion, but they really only have the right to express their opinion.”33
He believed he could construct every element not just of his buildings but of his personal existence with rigor and perpetual fine-tuning. What was vital was to take time and think things through, rather than to rush or to succumb to emotions. He told the six students, “I had 3,000 books in Germany. I spent a fortune to buy these books and I spent a fortune to read them, to study them. I brought 300 books with me to America and I can now send 270 books back and I would lose nothing. But I would not have these 30 left if I would not have read the 3,000.”34
That emphasis on reason went hand in hand with his belief in aesthetic judgment; Mies had strict criteria for appearance in which there were definite standards for beauty. He said to one of his first students, “Come now, Selman, if you meet twin sisters who are equally healthy, intelligent, and wealthy and both can bear children, but one is ugly, the other beautiful, which one would you marry?”35
It was because of his unwavering conviction about what looked good and what did not that Mies lambasted Gropius’s architectural work in front of his students, and felt free to remark that the name “Bauhaus” was Gropius’s greatest achievement. Movements, causes, and institutional loyalty were all secondary to quality; visual perfection was what counted. Mies wasn’t one for teamwork. Once, in a conversation with Gropius in Chicago, long after the closing of the Bauhaus, when Gropius was extolling the merits of group efforts and collaborative architecture, Mies asked, “Gropius: If you decide to have a baby, do you call in the neighbors?”36 Mies pushed his own art to its maximum; he expected nothing less from others. The only way to push ahead was in solitude.
ON DECEMBER 20, 1931, Dearstyne, who was American and had attended Columbia University before going to the Bauhaus, wrote home to his parents from Dessau:
One of the uncomfortable sides of associating with an architect of the first rank is that he ruins your taste for about all but one-half of one percent of all other architecture that’s being done the world over. Mies van der Rohe not only comes down hard on the American architects (for which he has, without a shadow of a doubt, the most perfect justification) but holds that one doesn’t need the fingers of one hand to count the German architects who are doing good work. … It’s much easier to work under less critical men and content yourself with middle-rate work. That’s what I was doing at Columbia and what most of the students in America (and here) are doing. But I thank my stars I landed where I did.37
Josef Albers, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, ca. 1930. Albers, who described Mies as “a great guy,” hoped that as director of the Bauhaus the elegant architect would be able to save the school, in spite of opposition from within and without.
That emphasis on perfection is one of the contradictions of the Bauhaus. A dozen years earlier, Gropius had founded a school where the primary goal was to improve design for the masses. But the greatest of the faculty he attracted to Weimar and Dessau believed mainly in their own work, and in the development of artistic excellence and consciousness of true quality, more than the issue of audience. It was the nurturing of the design and the making of the paintings that mattered more than the promulgation of the idea. They would be delighted if quality became widespread, and if what was good and true made an impact on the lives of viewers and users, but they knew they could not change the way the masses responded to art and design. What they could do was develop and support the vision of a very small number of gifted people. They readily excluded second-rate practitioners.
Mies believed in Albers and Klee and Kandinsky, but not in the second tier of painters. Albers didn’t believe in Mies, or Gropius, or Breuer, as architects. Kandinsky admired Klee; Klee mainly admired the artists of ancient Egypt and the chefs who had created a perfect “spaghetti a la sugo.” Anni Albers mostly liked the work of Klee and Coco Chanel. They all abhorred the idea of blind enthusiasm for “the arts” without quality judgment, and loathed a blanket fondness for the idea of creativity as promulgated by well-intentioned but undiscerning “culture” lovers. They preferred the contents of good hardware stores to what was found at craft fairs, and would rather watch sports well played than see a sloppy dance performance.
The idea that just being in a “creative” field conferred some sort of distinction was anathema to the true Bauhauslers. They had the highest standards for excellence and were the most discerning of connoisseurs. They were, in short, aesthetic snobs.