The Presence of Mies

By Detlef Mertins

The Presence of Mies is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that reconsiders the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, putting forth new ways of thinking about his work and new possibilities for extending its influence into contemporary architecture and cultural theory.

The work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of this century's most important architects, has alternately been revered and reviled.

The diverse outlook of the contributors produces a stimulating array of perspectives that consider the multiple resonances of Mies's work in relation to technology, image culture, philosophy, art, and education. Editor Detlef Mertins and president and director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Phyllis Lambert, reconsider aspects of Mies's research and practice. Fritz Neumeyer, whose book on Mies's writings, The Artless Word is a point of reference for many Mies scholars, and Sanford Kwinter both address architecture's relationship to technology; Dan Hoffman and Ben Nicholson discuss the pedagogical ambitions and work of their design studios, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Illinois Institute of Technology, respectively, where they have extended and transformed aspects of Mies's architecture and teaching. Rosalind Krauss and Ignasi de Sol-Morales Rubi stake out opposed interpretations of Minimalism and Mies. Rebecca Comay and George Baird both test-drive Mies through the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Brian Boigon and Beatriz Colomina address Mies in relation to "the culture of images," while K. Michael Hays proposes new interpretations of Mies's abstraction. The Presence of Mies also includes over 120 black and white illustrations of the master's buildings.

These essays result from a symposium organized by the University of Toronto School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture marking the 25th Anniversary of a monolithic Miesian edifice, The Toronto-Dominion Centre, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1963 (called by Philip Johnson "the biggest Mies in the world").

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568980132
• ISBN13: 9781568980133
• Release Date: July 2000
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 1.0" x 1.0"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Re-Modernizing Mies

This book is emblemmatic of the recent re-presentation of Mies. It is not the normative reading of his work and significance. Having fallen from grace in the 1980s, Mies was resurrected in the 90s by neo-modernist architects and architectural historians. The recent twin Mies exhibitions in New York (at MoMA and the Whitney) are byproducts of the rebirth of Mies. The essays of this book will make grand claims to position Mies van der Rohe as a misunderstood genius identified with a few seminal buildings and denigrated by association with all the pathetic copies of his work perpetrated around the world by drone architects of the International Style. Gratefully, the resurrection of Mies includes a cold, hard look at his notion of "site" and of "landscape" - however impoverished the sense of the latter might be in his usual glass-box-on-podium formula. The rationalist Mies was an invention of the purveyors of the International Style, Philip Johnson first among culprits, but also of Mies himself. His carefully crafted public persona buried many aspects of his personality and his work that are only now coming to light. It is only now that Mies is able to be seen as a putative poet of form with a troubled, albeit checkered history of surfing trends in the 1910s and 1920s (while in Berlin) till he found his place in formulating the architectural language and image of modern corporate America.