Mies Van Der Rohe Perspective

[Jon Levatte]

In the ground plan of this house, I have abandoned the usual concept of enclosed rooms and striven for a series of spatial effects rather than a row of individual rooms. The wall loses its enclosing character and serves only to articulate the house organism.**

Organism is a term as ambiguous as it is resonant. The rooms flow into each other without clear definition of their boundaries or their separation from the exterior, as they do in his Barcelona Pavilion built a few years later. The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright is obvious and was acknowledged.

I assume in my model (pictured above) there are patios beneath the cantilevered parts of the roof. The two parallel walls in the largest room, close together, near the top, most likely enclose stairs to the upper floor.

The three-dimensional sketch has a wide perspective with a low horizon and vanishing points well off the visible picture plane; I assume to give the building the horizontal cast Mies wanted. The upper room on the right is especially hard to read. Nor does the sketch match the floor plan in all aspects. It may have been drawn before the floor plan, nor is it certain Mies himself even drew it. In building the model I stuck to the floor plan for walls and openings on the first floor and used the sketch for overall appearance. I wanted to maintain the horizontality, so I kept the walls low. It was intended, I think, to be a spacious home.

Again, almost nothing is aligned in the first floor except the exterior wall at the top with the house's wall past the large patio. This reinforces the influence the extending walls have on the overall energy of the plan. In my design for the second floor, I made the back wall of the back room on the second floor align with the bottom exterior wall, for the same reason.

I also added that room to give the floor some width to better fill and integrate the whole building rather than have a narrow, isolated floor on top of the first. I decided it did not make sense, formally or practically, to have windows at the back of the floor overlooking the greater span of the roof, although I see alternatives to my placement.

The enclosure should suggest and complement the first floor, and have some complexity but not repeat its forms. My second floor, as is apparent from the overhead picture below, provides a complex shape that echoes its length and provides offsetting variety. That it's set at a right angle to the first reflects the cross shape of the exterior walls, reinforcing their influence and adding another degree of tension.

The first floor has overlapping squares and rectangles, these suggested but not completely defined. Study could be made of them, of their proportions and relationships, to find a pattern that, once understood, might provide a key for the second.

I only made a quick, tentative effort, without result. I have no basis for this whatsoever, but in order to maintain the open relationship with the outside I decided there would be a door or doors on the floor and continuous walking space on the roof around the exterior.

I am a writer and college English instructor with a lifelong interest in art and architecture. Many of my essays and short stories have appeared in print and online. I am currently at work on a collection of essays and my third novel, which will be set in the future. One of the issues I want to ...

sometimes the architect's "vision" is a real vision, one in which the construction is evident and how humans will occupy the space is understood........ based on what you wrote above and the little I know about this project, Mies may have had only a vision for a floor plan and not necessarily a house. What this means, like many architecture projects, the process of "design" was needed to resolve or make the vision of a floor plan a reality. Take BIG (Bjarke Ingels) for example. It appears most the time the Visions are of methods and process images within the design process (not actual architecture) and whatever reality that is achieved is somewhat unpredictable. sometimes a concept appears to be so exciting and radical its well worth the pursuits of designing it into reality and to await the outcome.......in writing it would be the same as taking one really good sentence and turning it into a book. sometimes the results are great and sometimes they are miserable. all architecure worth doing and studying is an experiment. you just worked out Mies' experiment.

I had a thought while writing this and building the model, probably impractical, intriguing or terrible, or both: What if an entire neighborhood were constructed of similar offsetting walls and volumes?

no - thank you for responding, always good to discuss after reading a text.................i think Lefevbre said something like 'architects have no idea on how their spaces are inhabited, their plans have very little to do with reality.' which naturally brings me to Bernard Tshumi, who Kipnis says in an essay is the best theoretical architect out there who builds, may be worth following his 'visions' through..............back to Mies, there is a bit of a contradiction I guess in what amounts to an "open plan" free flowing space and having divisions such as "service" and "living". I would suggest its not uncommon for architects to resort to formal methods in case the vision is failing or the architect is too tired or uninspired to create a vision. maybe he thought it would be funny to label open spaces as such and see what happens, or to apply traditional labels to radical forms and see what happens.........I would suggest much of the 'new world' approach is to create a much other world than the present and lets assume the other may only be ideas, in short its a bit of a crap shoot to imagine the world and how it would be, unless you create a mockup as you did and visualize a movie in the place................much of the 'new' in architecture thought are just reapplied systems of thoughts or analogies to other sciences and art, that often is the vision, which of course little to do with a planned reality......... we went out to LA in grad school and visited Morphosis' Caltrans building, someone was filming a sci-fi scene for a movie........Lebbeus Woods drawings were knocked off for the Movie 12 monkeys, and he won in a lawsuit.........if you look at the Futurists and Sant E'lia you would almost see today as their future bakc then, but oddly enough none of his key drawings have humans in them............no foundation is the foundation for some architects. deconstruct and start new. disregard the past as it has failed in many instances, etc............your last point reminded me of an installation by Douglas Coupland,on phone apologize for link -lego-345-project/ ..........i like where you are headed and often try to imagine radical or any apaces and their uses in day to day activities and then dive into like a Douglas Coupland scenario and imagine my way out of it..........I think it was the movie America Beauty that played out the suburban home scenario as it does play out. in this manner the mies project would get interesting...........

for instance: the long brick wall would become a place for kids to hide, dogs to piss, teenagers to make-out and smoke pot out of ear shot and vision of parents, a place to sell your drugs, the useful and segregated outdoor man cave, long line of statues and collectibles for a nutty old lady, a colonade with fountains for those with at least three face lifts, a place to hide all your cars from the neighborhood, a place for birds to land and poop, for kids to shoot birds with bb guns, an annoying obstruction when cops chase burglars, a canvas for fundamental Christians to paint scriptures on the wall for all the passer-bys to read, a house like this displaced close to a commercial road becomes a place for an advertisement and the renters get a new billboard monthly.............................further instance as per architect - I am the tenant of such a Mies house with such s wall. every morning this month I have to walk by some girls bikini bottom with a Corona in an ice bucket next to it. my girlfriend smacks me everytime I play grab the girls bottom. after 2 weeks of this my girlfriend thinks i could be cheating on her, given all the attention the Corona Ass on the brick wall is getting. we get into a fight in front of the wall and realize all the neighbors are watching. she runs inside and back out on the other side of the wall. we pace back and forth behind the wall screaming at each other. we knock over the long line of flower pots. i run around the wall to hide. she launches the pots over the wall randomly exploding next to me. i shout i am leaving, get in my car and go to the liqour store and buy a six pack of Corona as i stare at the same Corona Ass ad behind the clerk. was it the walls fault and zoning or Corona's? thanks Mies.

This has always been my issue with this kind of work. It's graphically elegant but ultimately not a place many people would like to live. Not that great architecture isn't frequently elegant graphically, but that shouldn't be the central element of built design.

Gary Garvin, nice article. If you don't know already, artists Michael Asher and Daniel Buren's Haus Lange and Haus Esters (two seperate works in two of Mies' Houses) installations could be interesting research for you as well. I briefly mention them here:

The floor plan for the brick country house for me is one of the most compelling and engaging figures in architecture. You only have to compare (there are similarities) and contrast it with the floor plan of the Parthenon, review assumptions and methods, and all kinds of questions open up.

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