“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”[1] This is how Ludwig Mies van der Rohe defined the meaning of architecture in an essay of 1924. Applied to the present day, it would seem that the will of this epoch – that is to say, contemporary architecture – has succumbed to a kind of vampirism: Reconstructions are on the rise and many projects are resurrecting buildings that no longer exist – and with them the forms of other, earlier epochs. The present wears the past as a mask and perhaps thereby arms itself against a present day that is evidently perceived as anything from unsatisfactory to threatening. At any rate, retro cults and revivals are booming – not only in architecture.
Something similar occurred in the nineteenth century in the name of historicism. The architecture clothed itself in the costumes of other eras and cultures. Modernism stepped up in order to put an end to his masquerade. The New Architecture for the New Man rose up against the old.
In the meantime, even so-called classical modern buildings are being reconstructed. This mainly goes to show that modernism itself has by now become historic. And when the modern architecture is as powerful as Mies van der Rohe’s, the desire to bring his destroyed or even unrealised buildings into the present grows – all the more so when the respective city marketing departments gain another tourist attraction in the process.
The interpretation of a myth: The Barcelona Pavilion
Mies’ renowned Barcelona Pavilion was reconstructed as early as 1986 to mark the great architect’s centenary. The building was originally built for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition to represent a new, modern Germany, which wanted to prove its break with its Wilhelmine past. The pavilion existed for just seven months and was dismantled when the exhibition ended. Its constituent parts, including the valuable onyx wall around which Mies had reportedly designed the building, have vanished without a trace.
Nevertheless, the Barcelona Pavilion (complete with furniture designed by Mies) has come to epitomise classical modernism. Only a few people saw the building in situ in 1929; its importance was also barely recognised in its day. The building’s fame came posthumously, in its later life as an image in countless magazines and books. It was above all its presence in Philip Johnson’s seminal 1947 Mies exhibition in MoMA[2] that elevated the Pavilion to the ranks of the twentieth century’s most famous buildings.
On closer examination, the reconstruction of 1986[3] is by no means a true copy of the original. After all, the reconstruction was guided by the intention to realise the concept of Mies’ Pavilion as if it had been designed as a permanent structure. In 1986 this mainly meant using the materials required in order to meet this new remit.[4] For example, while the roof of the original was made from a steel skeleton with cladding, this was realised in the reconstruction as a solid reinforced concrete slab. The foundation is now also concrete and there is also a heating system, which the original did not have. The building site also deviates from the original by a few metres. Because all we have from 1929 are black and white photographs of the Pavilion, the colours of the mousy grey and bottle green slabs in the reconstruction are moreover the result of guesswork. Above all else, the reconstruction’s symmetrical arrangement of the central, freestanding onyx wall constitutes a blatant departure from the asymmetry of the original.
The reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion is therefore not so much a reconstruction as a reinterpretation. But this – more or less intentionally – is almost always the case with every reconstruction or restoration. The transition from one to the other is also fluid.
Restoration minus history: Villa Tugendhat
The reconstruction of another Mies building provides a striking example of the above: Villa Tugendhat in Brno, built in 1930. This building, in which Mies transferred the Barcelona Pavilion’s concept of “flowing space” to a regular residence, was reopened as a “museum in itself” in 2012 after a two-year restoration process. Shortly after its restoration, the museum looks like a new build. In fact, this is also the case in some parts: For instance, due to water damage the external steps leading to the garden had to be demolished and rebuilt – although the render was removed fresco-style and reapplied to the reconstruction. At Villa Tugendhat, another modern 20th century icon and of course also a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site, the restoration process was complex and demanding. The remit for the restoration of the rather dilapidated building was to replicate to the greatest possible degree the original condition of 1930. The Czech restorers involved call this process “subtractive restoration”, meaning that all the changes to the original that had occurred over time had to be removed some eight decades later. After the emigration of the Jewish Tugendhat family in 1938, the building was among other things a children’s sanatorium. In order to eliminate the traces of later uses or modifications, in some places this only meant the removal of a “wrong” coat of paint. But in the bathroom, the missing fittings had to be reconstructed and then re-made based on historic photographs and with the aid of digital technologies. Today, the washbasin and toilet are also reconstructions.
Broadly speaking, the subtractive process overlooks history in favour of the “purity” of the (architectural) work of art, which, bar its actual use as a residence, is what Villa Tugendhat represents.
GDR history eliminated through restoration: House Lemke
This peculiar ahistoric-historicising will of the epoch had also dictated events at House Lemke in Berlin. Completed in 1933, House Lemke is the last of Mies’ residential building to be built in Germany. It was commissioned by the printing works owner Karl Lemke and his wife. Mies worked as hard as he did on Villa Tugendhat for the childless couple, designing a house that, to meet his clients’ wishes, ultimately had to be relatively small, modest and inexpensive. Since the end of the GDR the building has been used as a gallery for modern and contemporary art. The comprehensive restoration of 2000–2002 aimed to return the building to its original condition. The house had undergone a whole raft of changes since its construction: The once ceiling-high doors had been lowered and the former bedroom had been turned into a children’s room, with an additional window inserted in the external wall. In the 1970s in the GDR, the house was placed under a conservation order and partly reconstructed. Before that, the house had however also faced adversity: It served for a while as a garage for the Russian occupying forces and as a laundry depot for the “Stasi properties” in the area. In the interim, the house with its partly bricked-in windows looked like a suburban bungalow. In the 2002 restoration of the building to its original condition, these historically fascinating states were utterly ignored. Even original parts of the building were destroyed, such as the stone-flagged drive and the garden steps. The layout of the garden itself was largely based on a surviving plan by Herta Hammerbacher, the realisation of which is however questionable.[5]
No place for interpretation: Monument to the Revolution
For similar reasons, the reconstruction of another renowned Mies-designed structure in Berlin has so far remained unrealised, despite initiatives to this end. This is the memorial to the martyrs of the revolution of November 1918, located in the cemetery in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde. [6] One of the problems is that while we are familiar with the facade of the monument with its layered, protruding and recessed brickwork segments, which has been widely disseminated in photographs, we have no record of what the back of the monument looks like. Commissioned in 1926 by the communist party, the monument now however incorporates all sorts of political and historical implications, which also stand in the way of its reconstruction.
Reconstruction as a German-Polish conciliation project: Villa Wolf
A different fate awaits another building by Mies, for which reconstruction plans are currently underway. This is Villa Wolf in Guben/Gubin, the first modernist building by Mies that was actually also built. This already demonstrates the open-plan spatial structure that is so typical of Mies’ designs. Built in 1926 for the textile and hat manufacturer Erich Wolf, the building was extensively damaged in the war and demolished in 1945. Today, the park-like grounds with terraces leading down to the Neisse river lie on the Polish side of the once German town of Guben, now known as Gubin.
The planned reconstruction project owes much to the initiative of the former President of the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR), Florian Mausbach. To date, however, there is no financing in place. Mausbach has however already attracted a series of backers for what is intended as a German-Polish conciliation project. The plans and layout drawings still exist and the underground part of the building remains in situ, as an investigative excavation proved in 2001. If possible, the aim is to faithfully rebuild this “archetypal modernist villa in 1:1 scale”. Mausbach himself avoids the term “reconstruction” for his project, because this is ideologically charged in Germany – something that he learned in his former post during his involvement in the highly controversial reconstruction of Berlin’s Stadtschloss. The new-old Villa Wolf was originally scheduled for completion in time for the Bauhaus centenary in 2019, but it now looks as if the project will be delayed. A symposium in Berlin in autumn 2015 will aim to raise the public profile of the project. Mausbach expects broader support in terms of funding for the reconstruction only when the building work has begun, adding that basic financing to this end must first be secured.
The walkable architectural model: Krefeld Golf Club
A reconstruction of Mies’ Krefeld Golf Club of 1930 was also called a model or, more precisely, a “Walkable Architectural Model”. The never-realised building was built in 2013 on an 80 x 80 square metre area on the initially planned site in Egelsberg, near Krefeld. The model was a temporary building, in situ for just seven months. Wood was used as a building material for all non-load bearing walls. The artistic director of the project, Belgian architect Paul Robbrecht, likened the project to a musical interpretation of Mies’ plans. Although some details are missing and some parts remain “sketchy”, with materials such as stone floors and chrome plated steel supports, what was built came close to the look and feel of the planned building, without repudiating its model character. This facilitated a physical experience of the building lacking in the many 3D computer simulations – especially with regard to the interplay with the surrounding landscape. It has to be said however that these kinds of models would be nearly impossible to realise without today’s technical resources, e.g., CAD[7] programmes.
These sophisticated digital means of simulating and animating drawings and plans in virtual models and the computer-aided production of building components (e.g., cutting wooden sections to size) are also a major reason why reconstructions of destroyed or unrealised structures have become fashionable. By now, it is easy to bring historic plans or photos of old buildings to life in the virtual realm. The transition from virtual to actual building activity comes about in the same way as it would with contemporary plans (which are all realised with the computer today).
From a technical standpoint, Mies reconstructions are therefore not exceptional cases. But the fact that reconstructions of his buildings are evidently so popular (even when they are officially called restorations) is not only due to their undisputable class, but also because they have already become so iconic and popular as images, as media phenomena[8], that there is a desire to see them vindicated in spatial and substantial terms, even when some aspects of these built conceptions don’t quite add up – first and foremost their authenticity and, at the same time, their historicality as evidence of a bygone age. Mies reconstructions are therefore at least as much an expression of our contemporary “will of an epoch” as illustrations of built conceptions of history.
[1] In: Der Querschnitt (1924) 4, pp. 31 – 32
[2] Catalogue: Philip Johnson: MIES VAN DER ROHE. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1947
[3] Realised by architects Cristian Cirici, Fernando Ramos and Ignasi de Solà-Morales
[4] Cf. El Pavelló Alemany de Barcelona de Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1929-1986, Fundació Pública del Pavelló Alemany de Barcelona de Mies van der Rohe,1987
[5] Udo Dagenbach was the landscape architect for the reconstruction
[6] Cf. Mies Haus Magazin Periodikum zur Kultur der Modern, No.1/2005 "Denkmalkult: MIES' DENKMAL - rekonstruieren: ja oder nein?"
[7] CAD = Computer-aided design
[8] Cf. Colomina, Beatriz, Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies, Berlin, 2014