Mies van der Rohe - the true modernist...or is he?

Fransworth House, steel and glass construction, as perfect and flawless and it could be...

Mie’s Seagram Building, New York, looks  as modern as it can be...

Mies van der Rohe, to us architects (or to-be-architects), is the name that cannot be forgotten. To those not so familiar with the topic, he is more recognized for his famous saying, “Less is more”…and indeed, that is what he strived for, minimalistic, simplest, the “least as possible” forms. Mies was unarguably one of the masters of modernism; he has such character and charisma that someone as “bourgeois” as Adolf Hitler asked him to design the Nazi building for him.

Mies was one of the modernists, those that prefer the glass box, the simplest of forms and the use of honest materials. Like many architects of his time that worshipped the “international style”, Mies had written a rule amongst his followers, basically to be as far away from the ornamented, decorative architectural elements that remind him of the bourgeois as much as possible.

To understand this fully, these architects avoids the ornaments of the previous style because their ideal design was the house for the “working class”, where everything supposed to be functional, representing the true purpose of the materials. The idea of the “worker” house is that it would be pure, simple and functional, intentionally made for the workers, and above all of the things, non-bourgeois.

However, this idea of making the “worker house” for the workers is quite ironic, when Mies fled Germany to create a new era in the U.S. he did bring over his famous style, and many of his “modernist” buildings are well known and are still the landmarks until today. Still, his intention was the same; functional, houses for the working class but Mies had somehow got over boarded and forgot his true intention as he design more and more buildings. To explain this, Mies had became more and more well known that most of his clients are the wealthy people instead, in the other word, it was the bourgeois themselves who were living’s in Mies’ non-bourgeois buildings. Mies was famous for his small details and his preciseness, to the point that in the order to achieve that ultimate minimalist effect, it would actually takes more time and money to make his creation looks absolutely flawless. For example, his famous “Fransworth House”, needed extra money and labor to construct his flawless, steel floated foundation; the pieces and bolts needed to be cut and grinded to perfection, resulting in a more expensive piece, that only, the bourgeois were able to afford. Another one of his famous building, the Seagram building in New York also exemplify similar contradictory, first he uses bronze-tinge glass, to suit the liquor company, yet it’s a kind of “decoration”, but Mies got away with this saying, “bronze is a natural material”. Also, his well known use of “I beams” on the side of his buildings was a sort of “decoration” as well, since all of the steel beams inside needed to be cast in concrete to prevent fire, Mies felt the need that his structure needed to express the “true materials” thus, he stuck the I beams on the exterior of his building as for it to scream, “hey, look at me, I’m here inside the concrete”.

The bronze glazed glass and stuck on I beams...? isn’t they, sort of  decorations?

The beams seem to have been “glue” together, a result of hours  of labour, cutting the bolt and grinned them  into perfection.

But, wait, isn’t decoration, the utmost “bourgeois” things that Mies wants to avoid? The answer is yes, but you see, in the order to keep his building as perfect, flawless and utterly “Mies van der Rohe’s style” as much as possible, Mies had broken his own rules, he was being bourgeois while trying to make his buildings appeared non-bourgeois. My assumption is that, Mies was a great architect, however, he did get caught in his own style so much that, he was not willing to change. When his style itself, became only affordable to the bourgeois and the buildings themselves were becoming bourgeois, he did not want to admit this… In a way, Mies himself had redefined the definition of “bourgeois”, nowadays, when we think of the rich, upper-middle class, we do not only see them living in the classical, grand, ornamented mansion but also the modern, minimalistic, steel and glass boxes too.