In 1960 on our way back from Europe, my wife, Frida, made a decision: “You’re over seventy now and you’ve really done enough. Beside your profession as a painter, you’ve made films for forty years, for thirty years given lectures at universities and museums in Germany, Switzerland, and America, you’ve taught classes, and you’ve written a lot—it’s time you gave up all your sidelines.” She was right.
I had only just arrived in New York when I received a telephone call from a television producer from Chicago, whom I didn’t know; he asked me if I would like to make thirteen thirty-minute films for TV about Mies van der Rohe. In reply to my categorical refusal on the grounds that despite my undiminished affection for Mies, it was too late for me to take on such a gigantic task, I received a plane ticket to Chicago and then a letter from my friend Ludwig Hilberseimer, who had been working for years with Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, plus further urgent telephone calls from the producers in Chicago saying that “the money for the project is there.”
Eventually, as I sat facing Mies in his apartment on East Pearson Street in Chicago, it became clear that he himself had only a most general idea about this project.
For three days I tried to explain to Mies, whom I loved as an old friend and as a great artist and human being, and to the television producers and Hilberseimer, that one could not make a presentable six-and-a-half-hour film about architecture—not even if one could bring on Archimedes and Vasari (and Frank Lloyd Wright) in person. The most highly articulate heap of stone imaginable would simply not yield such a film, and six and a half hours of Mies would be a burial ceremony. Hilberseimer contradicted me furiously—as he had been doing since 1912. The producer provided dollar statistics; Mies said nothing (as usual), drank Scotch, and smoked enormous cigars.
After three days everybody was exhausted except Mies, and I was more than ever resolved to resist the lure of friendship and dollars . . . until at the very last second, as I was saying goodbye at the airport, Hilberseimer took me by surprise at an emotionally weak moment: “Only you can express something definite about Mies.” Against my better judgment (missing at that instant), I then promised to work out a project for a single thirty-minute film.
I worked it out. After sending it to the producer in Chicago, I received the laconic reply that there was no money for only one film. Since I hadn’t the strength to make thirteen films, no living document about the greatest builder of the industrial period of the twentieth century came into being. I was very sorry, but it has done no harm. His buildings speak for him.
It was van Doesburg who in 1921 piloted me, by a trick, toward Mies van der Rohe, suggesting to me that in Mies’s work my abstract drawings had found their concrete “application.” This would have lured even a stronger person than I, even though I was allergic to architecture (due to the fact that my father had originally refused to let me study painting, wanting me to study architecture instead). Indeed, Mies’s plans and my drawings were strikingly similar. These were the beginnings of a new formal language. The same language, originating in Mondrian, had been developed by van Doesburg’s De Stijl group; the same appeared in Malevich’s architectonic visions; the same again in the musicalized language of forms in my Rhythmus films; the same, too, in the new notation that became necessary for the musical scores of electronic composers. It was self-dictating, as an articulation of the twentieth century.
Mies came from a family of stonemasons. His name combines the names of both parents, both from the Lower Rhine region. From his stonemason father he had obviously inherited his granite-block body and his way of speaking in granite blocks: every sentence short and built definitively upon the one before it—“Building is the will of time contained in space. Living, farsighted. New. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today is formable. Only building gives structure. It structures form out of the essence of the task, using the media of our time. That is our work.” This conclusiveness in every enterprise was irresistible. I always felt that I was in the presence of innocence itself. There was complete identity between what this man did and what he really was. This innocent conclusiveness seems to me to be the real reason for the kind of four-dimensional charm that pervaded his personality and his work.
When I began to edit my magazine G in 1923, Mies became my principal collaborator. As such, he was the only person who influenced, in an essential way, this “homemade” magazine, which I kept going until 1926. This was the result of his style, but also of his personality and his financial help.
During the inflation period it was impossible to obtain money for ordinary daily needs, let alone any capital. During the Weimar Republic, Germany plundered its citizens down to the last button. When I had exhausted all my own resources on the first two issues, Mies leapt to the rescue. This required a particular athletic act. Not that an especially large safe had to be opened—no, what Mies had instead was an enormous board about four meters long, mounted on two solid trestles in his workroom. On the board were heaped several hundredweights of books and magazines. Only an elephant would have been able to move it, and perhaps to raise it up. Between this library-board and the trestles, Mies kept a supply of dollar bills with which he could have comfortably bought every house on Am Karlsbad, one of Berlin’s most stylish streets at that time. “Nobody,” he assured us, “nobody can raise this board.” And thus there was no access to the fabulous treasure. But he could raise the board. He would lift it, prop it against his shoulder, and extract a few dollar bills. In this way we were able to finance G, no. 3, our most luxurious issue.
When Hitler destroyed the Bauhaus, and before he did the same to Germany and Europe generally, Mies moved to Chicago as director of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
He seldom left his fortress in Chicago, that archetypal city of the industrial age. There he was “at home.” His big home was as economically organized as his speech. The gigantic living room contained two Mies sofas and Mies armchairs, a long table on which to deposit the whiskey glasses, and on the walls Paul Klee’s most beautiful oil paintings: “This is everything that’s left of my work.” The living room and bedroom were as bare as cells in a monastery. Thus he lived alone, until one of his three daughters came to look after him in the last years of his life. The emptiness of the rooms matched their truly Miesian proportions. He needed space, in the broadest sense of the word. He created it around himself.
While he was building the Weissenhof residential area in Stuttgart in 1927, a hectic dispute arose concerning his expenditure of space. Almost all the young modern architects, like Mart Stam, J. J. P. Oud, and others whom he had invited to collaborate, fought for a “minimum living space”: the minimum kitchen, living, and sleeping areas, so as to guarantee habitations for “as many people as possible,” and for the same amount of money.
Mies was against this: “We aren’t mice, and we don’t want to live in mouse holes. If you squeeze people in like this, they will eventually become, in every way, mentally and physically smaller and narrower. But if you give people space to breathe in, to walk and live in, then they’ll be better people—and that may be a better solution to the social problems than reducing them to mice.”
That is what he argued with the Barcelona Pavilion at the International Exposition in 1929, and that is what his physique and his mind spoke for . . . and it was this principle that he followed.
During the construction of the big “Glass House” apartments on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, the glass manufacturers told him they had no glass that could resist the winds off Lake Michigan if it were to have such proportions. Mies told them: “Then invent a glass that will.” So they did. When he was building the now famous Seagram Building in New York, for the big gin distilling company, the factories refused to make such gigantic bronze pillars as the ones he wanted. It had never been done, and it was impossible. Mies told them: “Make it possible.” And they did . . . but even then he was not yet able to start building. His builder’s license was valid only for the state of Illinois, and New York required him to take an examination in architecture, as each state has its own rules about diplomas. But the unrelenting Mies made a hole in the stone, even when the stone was in the bosom of a bureaucrat. He obtained his permission.
The Seagram Building soon became a tourist attraction in New York. Taxi drivers told native New Yorkers and newcomers: “The first and only bronze building in the world, by Mies van der Rohe . . . and they’ll have to polish it every year to make it shine!” Mies decreed: “In ten years it will be black.”
During his last years I only heard from him occasionally, and at the New Year. Printed cards with a few words added. The last one came with only four letters beneath the printed text: Mies.
Enough for a monument in this short eternity.