| |
2G
48/49 Mies van der Rohe: Houses edited by Moisés
Puente
Editorial Gustavo Gili, April 2009
Paperback, 180 pages
As the cover photo to this double
issue of the Spanish architectural magazine 2G attests,
when one thinks of the houses of Mies van der Rohe, the
Farnsworth
House immediately springs to mind. Overlooking the Fox
River near Chicago, the composition of glass, steel, travertine
and wood is a house most distinctive, a museum piece notable
for its transparency, purity of form and structure, and
ability to attract architects from all over the world. Philip
Johnson may have built his Glass
House first, but the detachment of Mies's design from
the ground signals something much stronger than Johnson's
at-grade solution. Mies would follow the Farnsworth House
with two more single-family residences, but it was only
in his unbuilt Resor House designed to span a ravine in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming -- a project predating Farnsworth
by about ten years -- where the framing and flattening of
nature achieves its fullest potential. These two projects,
in their distance from the earth, turn architecture into
a canvas and nature into paint, a phenomenon that architects
still strive for today in the numerous glass houses found
in all corners of the globe.
How Mies managed to reach the apparent
pinnacle of the Farnsworth House is a voyage documented
and retold endlessly, though a focus on his residential
oeuvre is nevertheless incomplete. Billed as the first collection
of all his houses built in Germany and the United States,
this beautifully photographed and carefully documented double
issue illuminates the movement from German beginning to
glass houses that can be seen as extensions of the high-rises
he is known for in his late career. This illumination is
aided by all three contributors to this 2G, editor Moisés
Puente's house descriptions and essay, Beatriz
Colomina's particularly eye-opening essay, and the newly-commissioned
photos by Hans-Christian Schink. The latter is marked by
bright whites and dark darks, but the contrast helps in
giving depth to the shadows and make the less-than-ideal
conditions of shoots like the Farnsworth House's gray autumn
day become a positive and result in magnificent photos.
Colomina's essay elevates the exhibition
projects and competitions of Mies's early years as key to
his development as an architect, including the media's role
in shaping his perceived identity. Mies did not start as
an avant-garde architect, but he skillfully became one via
the above and his relationship with art collectors, of which
he was one. To have all of Mies's houses in one bound collection
-- including unbuilt projects in the magazine's nexus --
is beyond convenient. It is well-crafted and valuable investigation
into the continuity (and discontinuity) of the master's
architecture as read through the all-important building
type of the single-family house.
or  or
(As an addendum to this review, I'd
like to ask 2G and other publishers who do not tab the first
line of flush left, ragged right paragraphs to consider
otherwise, or to consider another layout that makes paragraphs
more recognizable. On one particular page in this double
issue what looks like one big paragraph is in fact three,
a fact not apparent when the last line of each paragraph
ends close to the right-hand margin. The online equivalent
of such a layout can be found at blogs like BLDGBLOG
and Subtopia,
though I come across such muddled paragraphs far too often
in books these days. I don't understand the appeal, minus
making the text appear more solid, dense.)
|
