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.»

BERLIN NOTES (LI)

Piero Vivarelli 'Oggi a Berlino' (1962)

Monday, September 6, 1948

As of today we not only have two city police forces, but also two city parliaments. Perhaps by tomorrow we will have  two city governments and along the sector boundary a Chinese wall with battlements and watchtowers. Perhaps then one will need a visa to go from Charlottenburg to Unter den Linden. Just as we thought back then in July 1945 when the four-power occupation began. Perhaps.

RUTH ANDREAS-FRIEDRICH 'Battleground Berlin: Diaries, 1945-1948'

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (IV)

Architektur des Gerüstes, des in All geöffneten Raumes. 

BRUNO TAUT 

In 1919 Bruno Taut published his Alpine Architektur. An utopian project he began to devise, according to himself, on All Saints' Day 1917, in the midst of the Great War. A project which was outlined and re-drawn throughout 1918. A kind of utopia based on the empathic possibilities of Paul Scheerbart's Glasarchitektur, to whom Taut himself had already dedicated his Glashaus, the glass pavilion built during the first Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.

Bruno Taut 'Alpine Architektur' (1919)

For Scheerbart, the roots of war and therefore of destruction is boredom. So, to avoid this, Taut proposes this collective project which has the ambition to create a better structured universe capable of contributing to perpetual peace. Because, deep down, alpine architecture is a mystical fable that advocates for a complete reconstruction of the world, trying to fuse nature with architecture. But with a glass architecture, understood as the metaphor of a new and more splendid life. Because only this architecture can help us to transform the life and environment in which we live.

Jakob Tigges 'The Berg' (2009)

Ninety years later, also the architect Jakob Tigges presented a shocking proposal in the contest of ideas for the reorganization of the old and mythical Berlin Tempelhof Airport. Instead of a new neighborhood development or a new park, Tigges proposed building what Berlin lacks: a mountain. But not a simple hill, like the Teufelsberg, but a real alpine architecture: 'The Berg'. An absolutely unusual idea with a strong evocative power. A trully city icon that, in fact, will never have to be built, because no one denies that making it real is completely impossible. Instead, it has only been necessary to imagine it to end up becoming a whole collective utopia.

BERLIN NOTES (XLV)

Hans-Günter Quaschinsky 'Berlin, Bernauer Straße, Grenze' (1955)

They are all making plans alone. The plan is a tunnel, or you would have to go straight out into the desert, would have to free the camel from the zoo, untie it, saddle it up, ride on it through Brandenburg. You could depend on the camel.

It must be a "disharmony." Something is seeping through the whole city; everyone is sure they have read or heard "disharmony," and some even thought about it, but publicly it’s nowhere to be found. Still more trees are being planted, all in the sand, trees from the desert experience.

Berlin has been tidied up. (…) The sand is everywhere now – in the shoes, on the coal. (…) Below it, a pub is still open in Alt-Moabit, but no one understands how it’s possible. After all, the city has been tidied up. The owner pours double schnapps, then buys a round himself; his pub was the best, the oldest, always full of people. But these people are no longer in Berlin. (…) No one wants to talk anymore either, they speak only to say something, anything, and in any case everything runs out of the corners of their mouths and away, everything double.

At night all Berlin is a place for turnover and exchange. Everything gets mixed up in confusion, then some people pull away. Espionage has an easy time of it, every collapse is transparent. Everyone is out to get rid of his own secret, to surrender his news, to break down during interrogation. Everyone has everyone else on his neck, and in the dim light no one can check the bill foisted on them. Outside it’s morning again, it’s too bright. 

INGEBORG BACHMANN 'Ein Ort für Zufälle' (1964)

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (II)

Thirty years, two continents and two natural disasters separate one from each other.

Kisho Kurokawa 'Agricultural City' (1960)

It was 1960 when the Japanese metabolist Kisho Kurokawa designed an agricultural town in Aichi Prefecture, with the intention of replacing the agricultural settlements in Ise Bay that were razed the previous year by Typhoon Vera. A seemingly utopian project which aspired to solve the classical contraposition between city and countryside by integrating agricultural production into an urban structure. The city was made up of multiple communities. Each one of them located on a squared concrete platform, about 300 meters to 500 meters by side, elevated on pilotis, about 4 meters off the ground, to deal with future flooding. This platform was both a structure and an infrastructure, thus reserving all soil for agricultural production. Each community, subdivided by a grid of 25 blocks and 100 meters by side, housed a population of about 2,000 inhabitants. The central block was reserved for public facilities such as an elementary school, a shrine and a temple. The remaining blocks were where the housing of these new settlements was located.

OMA 'Agadir Convention Centre' (1990)

Simultaneously to Kurokawa's project, the Moroccan city of Agadir was destroyed by an earthquake, despite its moderate magnitude of 5.7 on the Richter scale. After this earthquake, it was rebuilt, about two kilometers to the south, as the typical post-Corbusierian new town. And it is from this tabula rasa where thirty years later, the form of this project, with clear metabolic reminiscences, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) arises. The project is a single building divided into two parts: a socle, which takes the sinuous shapes of the surrounding dunes; and a roof, which takes the form of a cloud. The socle is where the convention center is located, with auditoriums, conference rooms, etc. And the roof is occupied by a large hotel. The remaining in-between space, supported by a forest of pilotis, becomes a huge concrete covered plaza open to the beach and the vastness of the ocean.

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (I)

Simultaneously with his entry as a teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Ludwig Hilberseimer designed a City in the heart of the Friedrichstadt in Berlin. A project that becomes a kind of test of his Hochhausstadt of 1924.

Ludwig Hilberseimer 'Vorschlag zur Bebauung der Berliner City' (1929)

In that case, Hilberseimer took the capitalist logic of functionalism to the extreme. An extreme where the city was confused with the same system that generated it, where it no longer re-presented society but only re-produced it. Against the chaos of the Großstadt: order and uniformity.

Forty years later, Archizoom Associati include this photomontage in "Discorsi per immagini", an expression used by them and Superstudio as the title of their two contributions dedicated to a series of photomontages published in the December issue of Domus, where a whole set of non-functional objects inserted in the territory are represented. Images that show us the utopian conditions of our own reality.

Archizoom 'Quartieri paralleli per Berlino' (1969)

In this case, the multiplication, to infinity, of the Berlin Wall inspires this urban vision of transparent wall-buildings which croses and divides the city into multiple closed areas connected by a motorway.