The White Gods!
Come from the skies at last!
Mies was installed as the Dean of Architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago [later renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology]. And not just dean, master builder, also. He was given a campus to create, twenty-one buildings in all...Twenty-one large buildings, in the middle of the Depression, at a time when building had come to a halt in the United States--for an architect who had completed only seventeen buildings in his career--
O White Gods. In actuality, the IIT campus was, and is, surprisingly modest in appearance, especially Mies's Depression-era buildings, all of which were built on Spartan budgets. But once World War II ended, and the American economy took off and war-related construction restrictions were lifted, Mies began to build, and in quantity. For better or worse, the skyline of urban America is to this day shaped by Mies's glass box designs, as the interviewees of Regular or Super explain.
One of those interviewed for the documentary is Phyllis Lambert, one the most important figures in Mies's American career. Her father was Samuel Bronfman, owner of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, the famous distillers. In the mid-1950s, she convinced him to hire Mies to build Seagram's office building on Park Ave, thus giving New York what is arguably its best post-World War II building. The Seagram Building's interior contains two restaurants, the Four Seasons and the Brasserie. While the Four Seasons is a landmark--and islandmarked, along with the Seagram building itself--the Brasserie was almost an afterthought. Philip Johnson, who also designed the Four Seasons (and detailed much of the Seagram Building's interior spaces), designed it as a sort of a minimalist coffee shop in the late 1950s, but it closed after a mid-1990s fire. Regular or Super spends quite a bit of time exploring the space and interviewing Elizabeth Diller, the architect in charge of remodeling, but precious little time is explaining the restaurant upstairs, even though a few of the documentary's interviews were filmed there.
Lack of Footage Distorts Story
Of course, considering when the documentary was made (presumably early to mid 2003), Johnson, who passed away just this month at the incredible age of 98, was already probably not in the best of health.
The omission of a serious discussion of Johnson's role in Mies's career in this film highlights a problem with many documentaries. To produce something visually interesting, the documentarian almost has to "go where the footage is" when assembling a film, which may or not be the most important elements of his subject's life, and can dramatically distort how a story is told in documentary form.
Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
Ed, you're the best. Great article; interesting and informative all the way through. You know your subject and you've done your homework. I'll look for the documentary.
Have you ever read Daniel Boorstin's The Creators? Pretty good general guide through Western art and culture, I thought; a good crash course in a great deal. It has an interesting section in it on architecture, Louis Sullivan in particular. It may not tell you anything you don't know, but you might enjoy it.
2 - Huh?
"In 1946, [Herb Greenwald] was a 29-year-old former rabbinical scholar who had wanted to break into the burgeoning post-war real estate boom, and was looking for a top-flight architect to be associated with his projects. To his surprise, he discovered one of the best, living and teaching in Chicago." Yes, because Chicago is a backwater, *especially* in terms of its architecture . . . .
3 - marac
Ed. I feel you are a little too tough on the makers of this documentary. I love the opening snowy Esso scene. I wasn't expecting this..It's a surprise..a nice hook. And as you mite know..most great docs open with a something to grab the viewers attention.
By the end of the film, after learning so much about Mies and his work from others, we discover the brilliance behind the design of the gas station. How many gas statons fall under that category? I learn that with imagination even the bland gas station can add something positive to our architectural landscape. We can do so much better when designing any building...and the Esso station in Quebec proves that.
The rest of the documentary features wonderful interviews with the subjects given some nice backdrops. The photography here surely must have been nominated for awards as the buildings are as beautifully shot as I have seen. The filmmaker also makes wonderful use of the cool jazz music throughout this doc.
I mite agree that some footage of Mies could have been used. However, I'm not sure this doc suffered for lack of Mies footage. I mite have added some grainy b and w footage of Meis superimposed over some of his glass towers..for a neat effect..I'm sure the editor would have loved playing with something like that.
That's a minor quibble. If I were to find any critism of this piece is that there really isn't a journey here....However, somehow this filmmaker pulls off a delightful piece. And kudos to the person who came up with the catch title of 'Regular or Super.' Bravo!