This below is the outline of this essay, but you may revise as well as you want. (such as you
think some parts of this essay should add or delete)
Outline of essay 2
I am going to introduce the building Wolf House was designed by Mies van der Rohe in Guben
which is Germany style and from the chapter 9 one page 188. (Modern Architecture by Alan
Colquhoun)
•
Reason:
I learned a lot of great designers in this class. But my favorite is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Because I think that in a sense, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe established a contemporary
architecture standard.
I think he is the founder of the steel frame structure and the creator of the glass curtain wall. His
idea of "less is more" is not only a reflection of his architectural view but also a great influence
on the architectural style and characteristics of the world.
His glass and steel structures have even been affected to this day. I think he is. He adheres to the
philosophy of architectural design, which is "less is more", and advocates a new concept of
mobile space in the process of processing.
•
Background:
The Villa Wolf is considered the first modern work by the great architect Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe who is German-American. It stood between 1926 and 1945 between two parallel to the
Neisse gardens located on Teichbornstraße 13 which is Gubin. The 1926 in Guben on the River
Neisse for the art-loving cloth manufacturers Erich and Elisabeth Wolf built villa was built in
1945 in the last days of the war destroyed.
Yet, the town was divided after World War II between Germany (Guben) and Poland (Gubin) as
the Soviet Army pressed in from the east.
• How to Weimar Germany impact this design:
“The architecture that began to emerge in Germany around 1922 reflected a dramatic change of
orientation in the visual arts as a whole.” (Colquhoun 171)
•
Features:
-Modernist style
-Clear and open skeleton
-Flexible mobile space and concise and refined detail
-Mobility
-The independent wall is not only freely arranged inside the building, but also extends to the
outside of the roof.
-The shape of a building makes a different height according to the needs of the interior space,
which is both changing and balanced.
Conclusion
The bedroom floors are set back to provide roof terraces.
The Tugendhat House at Brno in the Czech Republic marks a new stage in Mies's
development [119, 120, 121). No longer in brick, it is rendered and painted white. Its
organization results from a site condition that recalls that of the Riehl House. Built against a
steep slope, the house consists of a monolithic cubic mass with a set-back, fragmented upper
floor, through which one enters from the street to descend to the living room on the floor
below. The living room is an enormous space divided by fixed but free-standing screens. The
monolithic volume of the house is wedged solidly into the sloping ground. The south and east
sides of the living area are fully glazed with floor-to-ceiling, mechanically retractable, plate-
glass windows, opening to a panoramic view. Thus, the inflected space, which in the Brick
Country House extends out to infinity, is here contained within a cubic volume. But at the same
time, this volume is made totally transparent. Classical closure and the infinite sublime are
combined by means of modern technology.
119 Mies van der Rohe
Tugendhat House, 1928–30, Brno, Czech Republic
The building is wedged into the sloping site like the Riehl House. The living room with its continuous floor-to-ceiling window is
one floor below street level.
189 / 318
8
Weimar Germany: the Dialectic of the
Modern 1920–33
In Germany, as in France, there was a ‘return to order' after the First World War, though it was
delayed by political and economic crisis. When it came it rejected not just Expressionism but
the values of the Wilhelmine culture that Expressionism had attacked. Whereas in France the
return to order, even its progressive form, could be seen as re-affirming an established and
triumphant national tradition, in Germany, defeated in the war, it implied a radical break with
the national past and a search for alternative principles.
The architecture that began to emerge in Germany around 1922 reflected a dramatic change
of orientation in the visual arts as a whole. The movement known as 'Neue Sachlichkeit
(“New Objectivity' or more accurately ‘Fact-like-ness')," was indicative of a new realism.
The term was first used in 1923 in the context of painting by museum director Gustav Hartlaub,
who defined it as 'realism with a socialist flavour'. The movement was sometimes interpreted
as a form of cynicisma reaction to the horrors of a disastrous war—and sometimes as a
‘magic realism'. The art critic Franz Roh expressed the situation thus: “The Expressionist
generation had rightly opposed Impressionism with the man of ethical principles ... The most
recent artist corresponds to a third type, one who shares Expressionism's far-sighted aims, but
is more down-to-earth and knows how to enjoy the present.
12
171 / 318
Unlike Mies's early neoclassical houses, these first Constructivist houses have one storey and become progressively more
fragmented. In the Brick Country House, closed volumes have disappeared and the space is defined only by free-standing
planes, as in van Doesburg's Counter-constructions.
118 Mies van der Rohe
Wolf House, 1925–7, Guben (demolished)
This photograph shows Mies's attachment to conventional ideas of picturesque composition in his drawings. He seldom used
axonometric projection, and made much use of diagonal perspective views, presenting buildings from the most favourable angle.
These early Constructivist projects in which Mies explored some of the fundamental
problems posed by new techniques and materials, comprise two Scheerbartian glass
skyscrapers (1921–2), an eight-storey office block in reinforced concrete (1922), and two
single-storey houses—a Concrete Country House (1923) and a Brick Country House (1924).
The houses in this group, together with the little-known Lessing House project (1923),
summarize the dialectic in Mies's work [117]. In the Concrete Country House the cube is
dissolved into a spread-eagled, swastika-like form; in the Lessing House the cube is broken up
into smaller cubes, interlocking with each other in echelon; in the Brick Country House the
cubes are replaced by a system of planes. This progressive fragmentation and articulation, in
which the external form of the house reflects its internal subdivision, betrays the indirect
influence of the English free-style house, Berlage, and Wright, but its immediate ancestor is De
Stijl. 27
The Wolf House [118], and the Lange and Esters houses, both built in Krefeld in 1927,
explore the Lessing type. Built of the local building material, brick, they are broken up into
interlocking cubes to form roughly pyramidal compositions of two and three storeys. The
principal rooms on the ground floor are opened up to each other to form sequences in echelon.
188 1318
The Bauhaus: from Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit
When Gropius was appointed to succeed Henry van de Velde as director of the Academy of
Fine Art at Weimar in 1919, he was given the task of creating a new School of Architecture
and Applied Art which would unify the Hochshule für Bildende Kunst with the recently
disbanded Kunstgewerbeshule. The integration of fine arts with crafts was standard policy in
German art schools at the time.4 But as we have seen Gropius had grander ambitions: he
wanted the academy (which he now) renamed the Bauhaus) to become the spearhead of the
AFK's programme for the transformation of German artistic culture under the wing of
architecture (see page 96). This programme was predicated on the belief that artistic culture
was threatened by the materialism of industrial capitalism and could only be saved by a
spiritual revolution. In the ‘Bauhaus Manifesto' of 1919, Gropius wrote, in Expressionist vein,
‘Let us conceive a new building of the future architecture, painting, and sculpture rising to
Heaven out of the hands of a million craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new in the future’
[107].5
Between 1919 and 1923, however, the Bauhaus abandoned its Expressionist ideology and
began to absorb the ideas of Neue Sachlichkeit, De Stijl, and L’Esprit Nouveau. The initial
impulse for this change came in 19 21 when van Doesburg set himself up in Weimar in
opposition to the Bauhaus, giving a series of lectures attended by many Bauhaus students in
which he advocated an approach to design diametrically opposed to the ideology of
craftsmanship and artistic ‘intuition' that still dominated the Bauhaus curriculum.
A second influx of ideas came from Russian Constructivism. During the early 1920s there
was considerable cultural interchange between Germany and Soviet Russia. In 1922 the first
Exhibition of Soviet Art was shown at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. This coincided
with the publication of El Lis sitzky's journal Veshch (see page 128). In 1921 the
Constructivist-based Congress of International Progressive Artists was held in Düsseldorf, and
this was followed by a Constructivist Congress in Weimar in 1922, organized by a splinter
group from the Düsseldorf congress, including van Doesburg, the Hungarian artist and
photographer László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and the Dada artists Hans Richter, Hans Arp,
and Tristan Tzara. These events greatly affected the climate of opinion within the Bauhaus.
The first institutional change within the school took place in 1922, when the Swiss painter
Johannes Itten was replaced by Moholy-Nagy as head of the Vorkurs (Preliminary Course). In
contrast to Itten, whose mystical approach to art teaching was based on psychological-
formalist principles, Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) introduced into the school an ‘objective'
Constructivist approach involving the manipulation of industrial materials such as steel and
glass and mechanical techniques of assembly. The difference between Itten's and Moholy-
Nagy's ideas roughly corresponded to that between the Rationalists and the Constructivists
Purchase answer to see full
attachment