From Aachen To Berlin

Mies van der Rohe was born in 1886 in Aachen, Germany, a city best known as the location of Charlemagne's cathedral, where he was buried in 814 A.D. But it was in Berlin where Mies rose to prominence as an architect in the 1920s after a series of revolutionary sketches for all-glass skyscrapers.

However, the actual buildings he built in Germany's inflation-ravished Weimar Republic were on a more modest scale. But by the end of the 1920s, he began to gather attention, as his career rapidly gathered steam. First, in 1929, he built the German national pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, more commonly known as the Barcelona Pavilion. Then in 1930, he followed it up with a house for the Tugenhadt family of Brno, Czechoslovakia.

The Tugenhadt house was an attempt to create a livable, domestic version of the Barcelona Pavilion. It became one of the most influential homes of the 20th century, with its enormous plate glass windows, tubular steel furniture, and open planning concepts.

With the Depression causing building opportunities to rapidly shrink even as his European career was its apogee, Mies turned to teaching, and became the last head of Germany's High Monastery of Modernism, the Bauhaus, before the Nazis closed it down in 1933. Because of the Nazi's general disgust with modern architecture, Mies was unable to find work in Germany, and was ultimately fearful of his life.

He ultimately left Berlin in the mid-30s to become the head of the Illinois Institute of Technology. (Architects of Fortune by Elaine S. Hochman is a superbly written look at this period of Mies's career; it parallels his life in the 1920s and '30s with that of a frustrated architect who would eventually carve out a career in German politics during that same period: Adolf Hitler.)

The "White God" Effect

Because of Hitler's art background and hatred of modernism, the Nazis persecuted numerous modernists in the 1930s. When many of these artists emigrated to America, they encountered what Tom Wolfe would famously dub the White God effect. Eager for work, Mies, Walter Gropius (who founded the Bauhaus), and other European architects and artists were somewhat astonished as they became superstars in the American art and intellectual world, which had long taken its cue from Europe. As Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus To Our House:

The reception given to Gropius and his confreres was like a certain stock scene from the jungle movies of that period. Bruce Cabot and Myrna Loy make a crash landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercrombie & Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones through their noses--who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange moaning chant.

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