The Artless Word: Mies Van Der Rohe on the Building Art

Mies van der Rohe's architecture has been well documented, yet his writings that contain the key to his thought and to understanding his work have been largely unexplored. From Mies' library - including his marginal notes - and from a body of writing that is surprisingly large for the self-described "unwilling author," Fritz Neumeyer reconstructs the metaphysical and philosophical inquiry on which Mies based his modernism. An integrated view of Mies' philosophy of building, including his American career, emerges from Neumeyer's investigation. He proposes, for instance, that the Catholic church architect and writer Rudolf Schwarz, the Bauhaus thinker Siegried Ebeling, and the Catholic scholar Romano Guardini may have exerted an even greater influence on Mies than the frequently cited Plato, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas and he points to the ways in which the thinking of other architects, such as Peter Behrens and Hendrik Petrus Berlage, affected Mies's development. Neumeyer also asserts that while Mies fervently believed in technology, in the notion that a building's form had to emerge from the nature of its materials, this view later shifted to include personal ordering of what Mies regarded as spiritual determinants, resulting in a new unity of spirit and fact that was best exemplified in the Barcelona Pavilion. And he argues, in opposition to Bruno Zevi, that the conflict between proclassical and anticlassical concepts and ideas is always present in Mies' work, a dualism of concepts that Mies followed in all his country houses and villas of the 1920s.

Table of Contents:
The double work field - architect as author; philosophy as patron - the view into the intrinsic, from accident to order - the way to building, the "Great Form" and the "Will to Style"; the ambivalence of concepts - construction or interpretation of reality? Berlage or Behrens? Hegel or Nietzsche?; elementary form-giving - departure for the limits of architecture - "Beyond Architecture" - on eternal building, construction as promise of art - building art in the raw, the building master of today; from material through purpose to idea - the long path to the building art - departure from the will of the epoch - building art as spiritual decision, 1926 - stimuli, critique and orientation, space for the unfolding of the spirit; architecture for the search for knowledge - the double way to order. Appendices: manifestos, texts and lectures - 1922-1927 - skyscrapers (1922), "Office Building" (1923), office building (1923), "Building" (1923), "Solved Tasks - a Challenge for Our Building Industry" (1923), "Building Art and the Will of the Epoch!" (1924), "Industrial Building" (1924), lecture (1924), review of Paul Tropp, Entwicklung und Aufbau der Miete (1924), letter to Die Form (1926), lecture (1926), letters to Die Form - "Regarding the New Volume" and "On Form in Architecture" (1927), foreword to the official catalog of the Stuttgart Werkbund exhibition "Die Wohnung" (1927), foreword to Bau und Wohnung and "Concerning My Block" (1927), introductory remarks to the special issue "Werkbundausstellung - Die Wohnung" (1927), lecture (1927), draft of a letter (around 1927); notebook (1927-1928); 1928-1938 - "The Preconditions of Architectural Work" (1928), "We Stand at the Turning Point of Time - Building Art as the Expression of Spiritual Decisions" (1928), "On the Theme - Exhibitions" (1928), the Adam building (1928), "Build Beautifully and Practically! Stop This Cold Functionality" (1930), "On the Meaning and Task of Criticism" (1930), "The New Time" (1930), program for the Berlin building exposition (1930), radio address (1931), speech on the occasion of the anniversary meeting of the Deutsche Werkbund (1932), "Expressways as an artistic problem" (1932), "What Would concrete, What Would Steel Be without Mirror glass?" (1933), "The H. House, Magdeburg" (1935), inaugural address as director of architecture at Armour Institute of Technology (1938). Part contents.