"Almost Nothing: Mies van der Rohe's Haus Lange and Haus Esters" curated by Kent Kleinman and Leslie Vanduzer is on exhibit from September 24th to October 22nd in the Arthur Ross Gallery, Buell Hall. Archival material has been generously provided by the Museum of Modern Art.
Notes on Almost Nothing
Mies van der Rohe's Haus Lange and Haus Esters
Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer
Haus Lange and Haus Esters (1927-30) have long been considered minor works, if not works actually damaging to the reputation of their architect. Mies van der Rohe's uncompromising and radical posture, firmly established by the mid-twenties, was threatened by these two structures that were not radical, that were reputedly compromised by uncooperative clients, and that were simply too late to be excused as early works. The degree to which the works were salvageable in Miesian terms was due to their purported tectonic rigor, namely the perfection of the brick bonding and coursing that reportedly governed the proportions and dimensions of the whole. They were, at least, paragons of procedural purity, the product of placing ?one brick next to another.? ?If I had to build a brick wall and plaster it on both sides,? Mies has said, ?I would still build it in English bond.?
But Haus Lange and Haus Esters are not what they purport to be; they are not the aggregate of a unit module. The acclaimed, perfect English bond of Borkheimer bricks is only skin deep, it is not perfect, and the wall construction consists of two discrete and incommensurate modules. The three most basic tenets of masonry construction?limited puncturing of the bearing wall, sectional alignment of lines of support; and a spatial economy informed by structure?are all systematically and provocatively violated. (To wit, behold the 5-meter-long bookcase embedded the full structural depth into a 7-meter-long primary bearing wall in Haus Lange.) The structural drawings of the villas reveal sixteen concealed steel columns in Haus Lange alone, and over 350 steel beams and 110,000 pounds of steel in Haus Esters. The structural steel calculations for the two villas encompass an impressive 212 pages. It is abundantly clear?because there are abundant clues?that steel is deployed to counter the gravitational imprint of the brickwork on the plan. In Krefeld, we are far from the discipline of masonry construction, or even from a compelling fiction thereof. We are closer to the realm of dazzle camouflage, wherein a structure (typically a battleship or a tank, but why not a plan?) is disguised by countering it with a non-conforming pattern without any attempt to disguise the act of camouflaging.
The Krefeld villas are decidedly not exemplars of tectonic rationality; they are extraordinary examples of paradoxical irreducibility posing as tectonic rationality, and posing in such a fashion that both conditions are simultaneously available to the attentive and inquisitive eye. From the perspective of locating Haus Lange and Haus Esters within the Mies canon, the resulting situation is doubly ironic. First the meager foundation of their historical acceptance turns out to be even more meager than first reported, then the basis for their historical rejection turns out to be precisely the prevailing quality contemporary scholars have discovered, and are celebrating, in the iconic works.
