Introduction To History of Contemporary Architecture

Introduction to History of Contemporary Architecture
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlino (1962-68) - (Federico
Bucci)
On 27th April 1968, in the supplement to the “Chicago Daily News” was published an interview
to Mies van der Rohe by Franz Schulze, who would later edit the architect’s biography. Mies was 83 and
had lived in Chicago since 1938, teaching and carrying out numerous high-profile projects in the United
States. With Walter Gropius, who also emigrated before the war, he shared the status of pioneer of
modern architecture, whose best outcomes found a fertile ground in the American technocracy. As
usual, in front of the interviewer, Mies was as concise; however, with few and measured words, he
succeeds in summarising his thought on the art of building: “In architecture, we deal with problems and
find solutions. The best architecture is the clearest and most direct solution to a problem”. Schulze
pressed him, asking how an architect, so bent on solving construction problems, could have been capable
of expressing himself. Mies’ answer was one of those memorable sentences that have fuelled his legend:
“Architecture has nothing to do with expressing yourself. You should express something other than
yourself, if you really must express something. This something else is the essence, the spirit of
civilisation that architecture represents. This is what the great buildings have done. They have said
something about an epoch, not about a man. If a man must express himself, let him be a painter”. There
it is: Mies’ deep sense of theological architecture, in other words an architecture intended as part of
that divine science which, according to Saint Augustine, founds and builds the “City of God”. For whom
who is interested in deepening the German architect’s cultural background, well-investigated by the
most recent historiography, it will not be difficult to understand the influence by Saint Augustine’s
thinking, as well as the writings by the theologian Romano Guardini, contemporary of Mies. That said,
let us go back to 1968, the year in which Mies inaugurated the New National Gallery in Berlin, his last
masterpiece which also marks the master’s return to Germany before his demise in Chicago on August
17th 1969. The Museum, designed to house the city’s modern art collections, is part of the Kulturforum,
Berlin’s complex of cultural buildings, now close to the new Potsdamer Platz neighborhood. The building
is arranged on two levels: the lower floor houses the galleries for the permanent collection and the
service areas, together with a garden displaying sculptures, while at the upper floor is a large,
uninterrupted hall, measuring approximately 5000 m², for temporary exhibitions, facing onto a terrace,
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in reality a podium accessible from the street via a broad flight of steps. The hall is covered by an
orthogonal grid of steel beams 1.8 metres thick and welded at 3.6 metre intervals; it is capped with a
continuous pre-stressed plate and supported, 8.4 metres above the floor, by eight gigantic and slightly
tapered cruciform steel pillars, positioned at the perimeter. The hall’s external cladding is made from
black-painted steel struts and transparent glass plates, attached to the roof with a swivel joint. To
continue the description of materials, inside the building, we find green marble clading the two tall
service blocks, the oak panels defining the stairs and, above, beneath the roof, the black aluminum
grids accomodating the lighting system. Finally, the flooring of the hall and external terrace is made of
light grey granite. All these elements, whose use is directed to solve the problems of constructing a
large exhibition hall, perfectly define the aspiration to objectivity that Mies so rigorously and coherently
pursued in his work. His buildings are as simple, precise, grandiose and repeatable as cathedrals, yet,
despite those (and there have been many) who have commercialized their inspiring principles, they are
inimitable since they have their raison d’être in a very specific idea of space that Mies implemented in
his work. A highly spiritual idea, in which structure, materials, dimensions and proportions come
together in a harmonious and elegant unity, responding to the variations in light and sound that the
environment offers and which our minds, together with our souls, perceive and transform. This is
architecture according to Mies van der Rohe. Let us entrust the conclusions to the illuminating
judgement by Ludwig Hilberseimer, who followed the master from Germany to Chicago to teach town
planning at Illinois Institute of Technology: “The value of his architecture”, Hilberseimer wrote in 1956,
“lies not only in his assured mastery of the various elements that comprise it but also in the harmonious
order that he has succeeded in establishing between them. The simplicity he favours, which appears so
natural, is, in reality, the result of continual study and methodical work. By following this path, he is
able to realise his ideas without compromise; to create an architecture of extraordinary clarity. Mies is
an artist; not an inventor of forms but a true creator. Mies’ architecture originates from the nature of
his materials, through which truth and harmony reveal themselves. The beauty of his work, in the words
of Saint Augustine, is the light of truth”.
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