MIES AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

Elle est belle, elle ne signifie rien.
ANDRÉ GIDE

Where do the sculptures of Aristides Maillol which appear in Mies van der Rohe's collages in his Museum project for a small town come from? In this project, commissioned by the Architectural Forum for its special issue "New Buildings for 194X" in May 1943, four Maillol sculptures share space with Picasso's Guernica and with another cubist painting by Braque: 'Torse de jeune fille' from 1930, 'Étude pour le monument à Paul Cézanne' from 1912, 'L'Action enchaînée' from 1906 and 'La Nuit' from 1905.

The origin of Guernica in this imaginary museum is clear. Picasso's painting arrives in America in 1939 and, until 1942, it is exhibited in several north american cities. Among them Chicago. From December 4th to 28th, 1940, The Arts Club of Chicago organizes a retrospective exhibition of Maillol's work. In addition, a year before this exhibition, a monograph is published by Berlin-based art historian John Rewald.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 'Concert Hall' (1942)

In 1942 Mies choses another sculpture by Maillol to illustrate his Concert Hall project. In this case, he creates a photomontage, with an image of the assembly hangar of the aircraft factory Glenn L. Martin Company, by the architect Albert Kahn, as a backdrop, where Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' appears, in the foreground, as a ready-made. His presence, however, reinforces the idea that, in this context, nothing is what it seems. It is not until a few years later that the sculptor Mary Callery, a personal friend of Mies, will remove Maillol's work to place the figure of a scribe from Ancient Egypt. Although in the catalog of his retrospective exhibition, between September 16th, 1947, and January 25th, 1948, at the MoMA, Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' will still be there.

That photomontage has its origins in an architectural design course that Mies teaches in January 1941 at the IIT. In this course he proposes as a theme a concert hall and three different ways of approaching his architectural solution. One of his students, Paul Camagna, opts for the solution of a single large open space with strictly acoustic partitions. And this is how the interior photography of a large industrial space is chosen, such as the assembly hangar for the PBM Mariner patrol bomber flying boat. Years later, Campagna himself will admit that the concert hall project is more of Mies than his.

Peter Behrens 'Ausstellungsraum in der Kunsthalle, Internationale Kunst- und Große Gartenbau-Ausstellung, Mannheim' (1907)

A year before Mies entered his studio, Peter Behrens asks Karl Ernst Osthaus, an art collector and patron, for a female nude by Aristides Maillol like the one it was exhibited, between April and September 1906, at the eleventh Kunstausstellung (art show) of the Berlin Secession. Osthaus brings him a plaster reproduction of 'Le Méditerranée'. This is how Maillol's sculpture, perhaps under the influence of german Hellenism, will become the main character of the room created by Behrens at the Internationale Kunst- und Große Gartenbau-Ausstellung in Mannheim.

But Maillol is not the first sculptor to whom Mies turns to in his works. In fact, in his collages for the courtyard houses of 1938 he incorporates sculptures by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a personal friend of his brother Ewald who was also a sculptor. Another photograph of the interior of Villa Tugendhat from 1930 already shows a sculpture by Lehmbruck himself. It is none other than 'Torso' from 1914. And in the Glasraum (glass room), designed by Mies and Lilly Reich, for the 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart, we find his 'Maedchen, sich umwendend' of 1913.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 'German Pavilion, Barcelona, preliminary scheme' (1928)

In one of the first versions of the German Pavilion in Barcelona, ​​Mies plans to incorporate up to three sculptures. One where we can find now ‘Der Morgen’ (the morning) by Georg Kolbe. A second, also on open air, at the edge of the main pond. And the third in the central space of the Pavilion. On the other hand, in a collage of 1928 a figure seated in the inner pond is glimpsed. There is also a drawing by the architect Sergius Ruegenberg, then Mies's assistant and later Hans Scharoun's collaborator in his Berlin Kollektivplan, where a figure sitting in the same place can also be seen.

If Kolbe’s statue, at that stage of the design,  isn’t even drawn it may be because it isn’t expected to be there. If we also consider that Lehmbruck and Kolbe did not make this type of sculpture, it can also be that the sculpture Mies has in mind, from the beginning, is none other than Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée'. On the other hand, the Pavilion is nothing but a Mies collage. In this case, a badly re-constructed collage. Because, despite not being a work by Mies, both Puig i Cadafalch's exterior colonnade and Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' are integral parts of the Pavilion. Because form, by itself, does not exist.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 'German Pavilion, Barcelona, interior perspective' (1928-29)

Nowadays, you can see Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' in the courtyard of Perpignan's City Council. A woman isolated and elevated in a pedestal leaning her, left, arm on her, also left, bent leg. It could be said that his skin is crushed by the sun of this Catalan Arcadia. Go see her, stand in front of her, accompany her for a while. She is all we have left of what could have happened in Mies Pavilion.

THE TERRITORIALIZATION OF THE CITY

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.
Genesis 1:28

Everything that Cerdà talked about had been already fictionalized by Simon Tyssot de Passot about one hundred and fifty years before. Specifically, in his “Voyages et avantures de Jaques Massé”. Where he describes a country without a city and the entire population is statistically redistributed throughout the territory. A territory organized on the basis of a grid with strictly orthogonal channels and paths. Even Gabriel de Foigny in his “La Terre australe connué”, two centuries before Cerdà and half a century before Tyssot himself, tells us about a society made up by a geometric urbanism, a domestication of the land and an egalitarianism guaranteed by the absence of private property and possession of particular goods.

Almost contemporaneously, William Penn devised his Philadelphia Plan. A plan, with a hygienic vocation, developed according to the Quaker principles of his own mentor: religious, racial and gender equality. The future city was organized according to a network of streets perpendicular to each other where two axes with civic and commercial vocation stood out. Two axes that formed the main layouts of the grid. Each quadrant had its public square, conceived as a green lung. Similarly, the plots of houses were evenly spaced to ensure a private green space for each neighbor. That fact allowed to maintain a certain sense of rural life within a fast growing city.

William Penn's Plan for Philadelphia, 1684

A century later, Thomas Jefferson goes beyond Penn when he lays the groundwork, three years before the Constitution of the United States, for the Land Ordinance. A territorial ordinance which plans its expansion to the West following a reticular mesh structure. In fact, an unknown and still uncharted territory is ordered. The abstraction of the mesh becomes the supporting structure of future continental colonization. In this sense, the map precedes the territory. As André Corboz state, project-space overlaps with substrate-space. The grid is based on roads and highways that materialize it as a guarantee of equality and social justice, order and stability. It does not equip, it distributes. It does not argue, it disposes. For Jefferson, utopia and reality are not two opposite categories but convertible into one another. The first serves to prepare the second.

Jefferson-Hartley Map of the United States East of the Mississipi River, 1784

The most paradoxical thing is that all the current defenders of the dense and compact city take Barcelona's Eixample as a reference. Ignoring the biblical maximum of Cerdà himself in his “Teoría general de la urbanización” (General Theory of Urbanization):

«Rurizad lo urbano: urbanizad lo rural:... Replete terram.»*

And by sublimating urbanization, the true territorial vocation of a Saint Simonian like Cerdà has been hidden from us. As well as his general and analogous theory of rurization. If urbanization consisted of opening the land to inhabit it, ruralization consisted of opening it to cultivate it. Anyway, to defend that the current Eixample is the work of Cerdà is like saying that the current Sagrada Família is the work of Gaudí. For some reason both are the result of an unfinished project. Like modernity.

[*] «Ruralise the urban, urbanise the rural:... Replete terram.»

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (III)

Ce n'est pas une tour. 

JEAN NOUVEL 

To state that the decline of monumentality coincides with the rise of modernity it is not anything original. According to Charles Jencks, the appearance of this new genre, which he himself named the iconic building, has finally replaced the urban monument. When people stops to believe in God, they don’t believe in anything. They believe in anything. As banal as it may be. So if, in principle, anything can be a work of art, anything could also be an icon. But it is not so. If a building wants to be iconic must have a provocative image that generates controversy. Let anyone talk about you even if it is to criticize you. In essence, the iconic building is the simple application of the shock and awe military doctrine and the wow effect factor, as Mayor Bloomberg a few years ago called for the new singular New York City buildings. Although Deyan Sudjic argues that the iconic building is a fading fashion and it will eventually disappear, Jencks claims that the iconic building is here to stay.

Jean Nouvel 'Torre Agbar, Barcelona' (1999-2005)

It is said that, after dismissing the Italian architect Renzo Piano, Agbar chose Jean Nouvel as the architect in charge of designing their new headquarters. In a first meeting with the client, the French architect presented three tower proposals. At one point during the presentation, Nouvel took out a Montecristo cigar, the same one that Mies van der Rohe usually smoked, from his jacket, and, placing it upside down, said: “but this one is my favorite”. Decontextualizing, shamelessly, both  ‘La trahison des images’ by René Magritte and the Adolf Loos’ Dadaist proposal for the Chicago’s Tribune Tower Competition. Next he added that “I think it also evokes the towers of Gaudí's Sagrada Família, and the stone millstones of Montserrat too” and ended up prophesying that “I am convinced that it can become a city icon”.

Norman Foster 'Swiss Re HQ, London' (1997-2004)

Two years earlier, Norman Foster had received a similar commission from Swiss Re. The insurance company wanted to build a new headquarters on the ruins of the Old Baltic Exchange. A building destroyed by an IRA bomb on 10 April 1992 at 9:20 pm, in the heart of the City of London. To justify its absolutely banal form, Lord Foster was forced to bring together a good number of excuses. At the end, the energy performance of the building, which is supposed to consume 50% less compared to other similar buildings, ended up becoming its main, if not the only, argument. However, Madelon Vriesendrop, playing with possible analogies, ended up disguising it in a missile, a lipstick, a matryoshka doll or a cucumber form. And that's how it's finally known today: The Gherkin.

Ivan Leonidov 'Institut des Statistiques, Moscou' (1929-1930)

A few years ago, while walking through one of Centre Pompidou's lost corridors, I discovered a project by Ivan Leonidov which I have never seen published anywhere before. So much controversy, if one had copied the other, and it turned out that both had plagiarized a project, still unpublished today, with more than half a century of existence. A kind of unusual building-manifesto for which the city seems to be nothing more than a mere backdrop. In this case, its shape is explained as a container of new functions. An object in the service of the then new socialist man. The fact is that if Nouvel states that this type is not a tower, it may be because he, intimately, thinks that it is, paradoxically, a socialist icon. Looking at it again, but from a historical perspective, this Leonidovism* revelation as a forerunner of this new architectural genre, which is the iconic building, would not be so strange either.

[*] In a 1930 Stalinist purge report on the petty-bourgeois tendency in Soviet architecture, Leonidovism (a term referring to the work of Leonidov and his disciples) is described as pure aestheticizing graphism, of technical and professional insufficiency, contrary to dialectical materialism and, of course, of being cosmopolitan.