Mies Is More

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The show at MOMA, which was organized by architecture curator Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, a Columbia University art professor, tries to reconcile Mies with some of his critics by arguing that he was far more preoccupied than most people realize with fitting even his starkest designs to the natural setting around them. So in an early masterpiece, the German Pavilion that he designed for the 1929 International Exhibition in Spain, inside flows to outside through staggered walls and wide plains of glass that admit views of the park that surrounds it.

Mies was a man with his share of contradictions. All his life he combined the bearing and wardrobe of a bourgeois with a merciless intellectual radicalism. This may be why, with his constant cigar, he could look at times like Mephistopheles in a Brechtian update of Faust. Like Wright, he also sustained a 19th century romantic notion of himself as an artist, a man answerable only to his own instincts. (After just a few years of marriage in the 1920s, his hapless wife Ada decided to stop resisting his regular infidelities and move out.) Mies insisted that the architect must surrender his urge to add personal "touches," but he broke his rule on some of his greatest buildings. The slender steel mullions that run up the walls of the Seagram Building and provide its rhapsodic vertical flight, have no structural purpose. The real load-bearing steel is buried behind them in the flame-retarding concrete required by New York fire codes. Mies applied the exterior steel because he liked how it looked. He was right.

To an even less high-minded generation of developers and builders, Mies' elegant minimalism was simply a green light to throw up thousands of hasty glass cartons in every city and suburban office park. What we learned from those is that mediocre Modernism looks even worse than mediocre Victorian. There's less to look at, and what there is, is cheap. But Mies' work was something different. He found a way to make the barest of bare bones sumptuous and even exciting. As Spencer Tracy once said about Katharine Hepburn, "There ain't much meat on her, but what there is, is cherce."