Revisiting Mies’s Tugendat House

Architizer News

Revisiting Mies’s Tugendat House

December 15, 2011

At Architizer’s recent holiday party, a friend and I drunkenly sparred over, among other similarly geeky topics, the perennial question of who was the greatest architect of the past century. I took Corbu, she took Mies, with the argument quickly devolving into anecdotal exchange, the kind of which all architects love. I may have said something of Corbu’s Atlantic crossing in the early ’30s, while she related to me the story of Mies’s first visit with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937. While Le Corbusier and Gropius had both been rebuffed by Wright after extending offers to make the pilgrimage to Taliesin (Corbu famously responded by calling Wright the “blue-eyed prairie dog”), Mies was given a warm welcome, so much so that his planned overnight stay was extended to four long days of talks, formal dinners, and tours of Wright’s works. It was at Taliesin, in the American Midwest, the story goes, that Mies, fresh off the flight from Europe, fully came to perceive the spatial properties of the plane–the eureka moment that would send the American Mies on his way. An uncharacteristically ragged Mies, stirred by the magnitude of the experience, returned to Chicago with, according to Wright himself, “his shirt was [sic] quite gray!”

While Wright, who assumed a paternalistic role over Mies and all his other contemporaries, would derive the lineage of the latter’s oeuvre to his own, he kept his debt to the German architect well hidden. Wright had much studied Mies’s early canonical works, such as the Brick House project, the Barcelona Pavilion, and the Tugendat Residence–the subject of the newly uploaded documentary above. The video is compiled from archival footage and interviews with historians, Mies’s grandson, and the Tugendhat daughters, who still exhibit a fondness and an admiration for their former home. Unlike many former inhabitants of modernist homes, such as Mrs. Farnsworth, they appreciated the austerity of Mies’s architecture because it was “always striving for truth and clarity.”