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.

The artless word: Mies van der Rohe on the building art

Arts & Photography

Neumeyer, Fritz

Architecture

MIT Press]

Mies van der Rohe's architecture has been well documented, yet his writings, which contain the key to understanding his work, have been largely unexplored. 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 appendix presents all of the essential texts by Mies, including some that have not previously appeared in English. Of special interest is the manuscript notebook from the Mies van der Rohe Archive in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, dating from the crucial years 1927-28 and published for the first time in this book.

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

Mit Pr

Hans Kollhoff is one of Germany’s most widely discussed and prominent architects, his works ranging from the high-rise at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and the conversion of the former Berliner Reichsbank to the Foreign Office of the new Berlin Republic. Kollhoff continues to define the essence of contemporary architecture while maintaining the standard of excellence and attention to detail that recall the world’s classic structures.

Hans Kollhoff: Architektur/Architecture

Reference

Kollhoff, Hans

Timmermann, Helga

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Prestel Pub

The expert contributors to this lavishly illustrated volume, devoted entirely to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929, address here for the first time the forgotten contexts of the Pavilion’s genesis. Habitually thought of as an abstract, unpolluted, and splendidly isolated building—a precursor of Mies’s American period—the Pavilion is revealed here as a thoroughly European work, perhaps less pristine but more authentic. Mies and Lilly Reich were commissioned to design not only the Pavilion but also more than one hundred thousand square feet of German stands spread throughout the Exposition. By examining that work in addition to the Pavilion itself, the contributors present a far-reaching reinterpretation of the whole. They also explore connections with the mass media, highlight the work’s antecedents and meaning in the history of architecture, and analyze the current pavilion, a reconstruction of the original built in 1986. No other critical study offers a comparable overview of Mies’s work in Barcelona.

Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona-1929

Capdevila-Werning, Remei

Colomina, Beatriz

Lahuerta, Juan José

Martínez De Guereñu, Laura

Neumann, Dietrich

Papapetros, Spyros

Robbers, Lutz

Rodríguez Pedret, Carmen

History & Criticism

Tenov Books

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