ART HISTORY - The Lasting Effects of Mies van der Rohe

The Lasting Effects of Mies van der Rohe

At its best, the uncompromising rationalism of Mies's architecture could produce compelling examples of pristine, streamlined form. In lesser hands, as is apparent in skylines across the United States, Mies's minimalist forms could come redundant and impersonal, being almost brutal glass and steel monuments to consumer capitalism or drab, monotonous apartment dwellings. In the words of architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, "Mies's reductive theories, carried to their conceptual extreme, contained the stuff of both sublimity and failure, to which even he was not immune." By the early 1970s, the modern movement, and particularly the International Style as represented above all by Mies and Le Corbusier, would encounter a protracted backlash, opening the door to the era of Postmodernism.
In the 1930s a number of events and individuals pointed the way to a new modern era in American design. Following the 1932 exhibition at The Museum of Modem Art in New York that gave the International Style its name, exhibitions of the Chicago School (1935), Le Corbusier (1935), and the Bauhaus (1938) all took place. Also in the 1930s, a number of new skyscrapers were built that broke the eclecticism of the skyscraper form and reintroduced aspects of the Chicago School or innovations of the Bauhaus and the International Style.

During the first half of the twentieth century, most experiments in modern architecture were carried out on individual houses. This is understandable, since the cost of building a skyscraper or an industrial complex is so exorbitant that it took a half-century before a greater number of patrons dared to gamble on modern buildings. The first European architects to come to America in the 1920s, William Lescaze, Richard Neutra (1892-1970), and Rudolf Schindler, devoted much of their careers to house architecture. The Austrians Schindler and Neutra worked for Wright and were partners for a time. They each built a house in California for Dr. Philip Loveil, combining aspects of Wright's house design with that of the International Style. The Neutra house - placed spectacularly on a mountainside - was built of steel girders on a foundation of reinforced concrete. Through its open terraced construction, Neutra took every advantage of the amenities of landscape and climate and (along with Schindler) created a distinct style of southern California architecture.