Affirming the Absolutes

It was enough to make an old patriarch sorrow for his erring sons. In FORTUNE last month, Manhattan Architect Philip Johnson, a onetime disciple, had said: "This is still a period of disintegration in all the arts. There's no particular advantage to chaos, but that's where we are." Added Chicago Architect Harry Weese: "Mies continues to be our conscience, but who listens to his conscience these days?" With his 80th birthday approaching and an exhibition of his drawings on view at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, Chicago's German-born Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the world's greatest living architect, took time last week to affirm that he, for one, still heeded his conscience, that his faith in his own first principles was as firm as ever.

In modern architecture today, as Mies sees it, there are two vying ten dencies: "One has a structural basis, and you may call it the more objective. The other [Le Corbusier's] has a plastic basis, which you could call emotional. You cannot mix them. Architecture is not a martini. Architecture is a language having the discipline of a grammar. Language can be used for day-to-day purposes as prose. And if you are very good, you may speak a wonderful prose. And if you are really good, you can be a poet. But it is the same language."

Clarity or Boredom. In Mies's view, the new language began to be spoken about 1900, and it was first articulated not by architects but by engineers: "The most important idea in modern architecture is the skeletal idea developed right here in Chicago." In fact, it was photographs of Chicago and Manhattan steel skyscrapers under construction that inspired Mies's first models for a steel and glass tower. They led him to his skin-and-bones philosophy that structure was the probity of architecture and should stand clearly revealed behind panels of glass.

It is also a philosophy that has inspired countless imitators and led to the charge that such stripped-down structures add up to monotony. Not so for Mies: "Some people say that what I do is 'cold.' That is ridiculous. You can say that a glass of milk is warm or cold. But not architecture. You can be bored by architecture, however. I am bored by this stuff I see around me. It has no logic or reason."

Form, Not Function. To prove that his precisely disciplined structures are in tune with a scientific, technological and industrial society--and can range from everyday prose to high poetry--Mies singled out from a lifetime's work his half-dozen favorite buildings. In order, they are:

> Illinois Institute of Technology's Crown Hall, a single glass-walled room, measuring 120 ft. by 220 ft. and spanned by four huge trusses. The structure simply encloses an envelope of space; the functions within can be changed by shifting movable partitions.

> The Chicago Federal Center, still under construction, and Mies's largest complex of high-and low-rise buildings.

> Manhattan's Seagram Building, the skyscraper city's most tranquil and most costly tower.

> Chicago's 860 Lake Shore Drive apartments, his dramatic demonstration of open planning for tall apartment living behind all-glass facades.

>The project for a Chicago Convention Hall where 50,000 people could gather in unobstructed space beneath a gigantic trussed roof 720 ft. square.

> The German Pavilion (since destroyed) in Barcelona's 1929 International Exposition, a jewel-case structure employing the open planning first developed by Frank Lloyd Wright that combined the richness of bronze, chrome, steel and glass with free-standing walls.

The Right Track. For Mies, such buildings give ample proof of the diversity possible within the unity of a strict structural discipline, one that he has applied to everything from a skyscraper to a chair (the chair, he confessed, was more difficult). "I have tried to make an architecture for a technological society," Mies said. "I have wanted to keep everything reasonable and clear--to have an architecture that anybody can do."

As Mies admits, by now almost everyone has tried, and results are mixed indeed. But he believes that architects should continue, and with more discipline: "You certainly will see the difference in the finished buildings, between the greater and the lesser talents. But at least they would be on the right track. And after all, a civilization is not the invention of one or two people."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.