Do you know why the founder of the International Style, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, never lived in any of his glass skyscrapers?
Around this fact, critics of the architectural style of the meter built many versions, saying that multi-story parallelepipeds made of glass and metal are unsuitable for a comfortable life. Meanwhile, the solution is simple: Ludwig collected a collection of paintings by Klee and Kandinsky. And in houses with continuous glazing, there simply weren't enough walls to hang pictures on. This was told to German journalists by Misa's grandson, 80-year-old Dirk Lohan, an architect and owner of the rights to the intellectual heritage of the great architect.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) in his apartment, Chicago, 1964. On the walls are paintings from the collection, on the table is a legendary ashtray-bowl made of optical glass
Dirk Lohan is now consulting on the renovation of the New National Gallery in Berlin, one of Mies van der Rohe's last surviving buildings. For Lohan, the Neue Nationalgalerie was one of the first projects he worked on as a manager. He also inherited Misa's legendary optical glass ashtray, which, by the way, will become one of the exhibits of the updated gallery.
This is what the Neue Nationalgalerie building looked like in 1968. Photo: Reinhard Friedrich
A fragile legacy
Mies van der Rohe completed work on Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie in 1968, a year before his death. It was the only building created by the architect in his homeland after the Second World War. The modernist orthogonal box made of glass and metal with a huge open interior space served for almost five decades as an ideal place for large-scale installations, but it turned out not to be very suitable for permanent exhibitions of paintings.
At night, the gallery building turned into a huge multi-colored lantern
The glazed facade with right angles could not withstand temperature fluctuations: the glass heated up under the sun's rays, due to the humidity maintained in the gallery to preserve the paintings, condensation formed on the glass, and the glass cracked on cold nights.
It was necessary to change one glass panel after another, and in 2012 it was decided to close the building for reconstruction. It was entrusted to David Chipperfield, a London architect who had previously been engaged in the reconstruction of the Neues Museum on the museum island built in the middle of the 10th century according to the project of Friedrich August Stüler for more than XNUMX years, and, symbolically, received the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe award for his painstaking work.
David Chipperfield's installation Stikes and Stones, installed on the eve of the closure of the New National Gallery for renovation. Photo: David von Becker
Before the gallery was closed for renovation, David Chipperfield transformed the museum hall into a forest, installing 144 wooden false columns that emphasized the ingenious architecture of Mies, where the weight of the monumental roof rests on only eight narrow steel supports.
The installation was a kind of prologue to the further transformation of the modernist icon into a construction site. After a three-month exhibition, the museum was closed, the modern art collections, which include works by Picasso and Warhol, went into storage, and Chipperfield began tearing down the covers.
David Chipperfield on the construction site of the New National Gallery, from which its glass covers were torn off. Photo: Gordon Welters for The New York Times
This is how David Chipperfield was caught by journalists of The New York Times last September. Stripped of its gleaming facades and granite floors, the building that once evoked associations with the Altar of Pergamum now, with its tattered steel frame and concrete ribs, had an unattractive and prosaic appearance.
"It's a bit of a shock," Chipperfield said. "Now you understand how illusory architecture is."
Every architect is part con artist, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is one of the geniuses, David believes. His task is to eliminate all the technical problems of the building, keeping its image the way Mies intended. "There is something sacred about it. It looks a bit like a Greek temple. Every element, every joint is part of the architecture. Miss said that God is in the details. A loss of detail would mean a loss of architecture,” says Chipperfield.
This approach of the British architect is fully supported by his colleague, Mies's grandson, Dirk Lohan. Initially, it was planned that the reconstruction would be completed in 2018, but now its completion date has been postponed to 2020.
Insufficiently transparent Miss
The building of the Memorial Library named after Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, designed by Mies, was built in 1972, three years after the architect's death. Reconstruction began last year due to the fact that the four-story building, raised on stilts, did not meet all the requirements for modern libraries.
This is what the library building looked like before the reconstruction
Now the library is not just a place where people come to get a book, it is a multicultural center with public and commercial blocks that provides a whole range of services and thus earns its living.
The commission that evaluated Mies van der Rohe's building considered it "insufficiently permeable" and "insufficiently spacious"
The project is being modernized by a team of architects from the Dutch office Mecanoo in cooperation with Martinez + Johnson Architecture. Mecanoo's founder, Francine Huben, proposed to increase "transparency" by removing all brick walls from the interior and replacing them with glass partitions, and adding glass elevators and escalators to the monumental staircase between floors.
Visualization of the exterior of the library building. Image source: Mecanoo
Huben planned the expansion of the useful area in the form of a superstructure on the roof of the building, which was also decided to be landscaped, receiving another open public space. The city government of Washington allocates $208 million for the project.
Visualization of the interiors of the library building. Image source: Mecanoo
It is obvious that compared to the reconstruction project of the museum in Berlin, the modernization of the library involves a more radical intervention in Mies' architecture. Francine Huben explains why: "We respect Mies van der Rohe and carefully researched his work before starting to create the Library of the Future." But the most important thing is to bring the values of Martin Luther King to the fore. My dream is to make this building a reflection of his ideals."
Architect Francine Huben talks about plans to expand the library
It would seem that Martin Luther King followed the same principles as Mies van der Rohe. It is openness, transparency and accessibility. King erased social boundaries, and Mies - the boundaries between interiors and the environment. Mecanoo architects themselves talk about this similarity. In March 2017, before the renovations began, the library premiered the documentary film Legacy: Miss and King, detailing the upcoming work.
Poster for the screening of the documentary "Legacy: Miss and King"
And yet, agree, the very fact that from the point of view of modernity the architecture of the great internationalist, which seemed so extreme in the middle of the XNUMXth century, may seem insufficiently "transparent" seems somewhat unexpected.
