The newest and—according to its publisher, Phaidon—“most definitive” monograph on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe weighs 6½ pounds, has 542 pages, and 600 illustrations, and, at a size of 12 by 9 3/8 inches, will fit only horizontally into most bookshelves. It is a monument to the architect's enduring legacy and appeal, but also a fitting tribute to its author Detlef Mertins, eminent Mies scholar, former chair and professor at the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, who sadly passed away in January 2011 at the age of 56. Several of his friends and colleagues, among them Barry Bergdoll, Ed Dimendberg, and Felicity D. Scott, together with his partner Keller Easterling, helped to see the manuscript through to publication.
The elegantly produced volume traces the arc of Mies's work from conventional suburban villas in Berlin to his visionary designs and few executed European buildings in the 1920s, and then the North American work in Chicago and New York in the postwar era. Each of the book's 21 chapters centers on one of Mies's projects or buildings as the starting point for an exploration of broader themes and related structures. It introduces us to his early work and first encounters with philosophy via the Riehl House, offers a view of the Weimar Republic's art and architecture through his unrealized skyscraper and office building projects in a chapter called “New Beginnings,” and uses the Barcelona Pavilion as an example in “Spiritualizing Technology.” We hear about IIT in the chapter “Open Campus,” Chicago's Lake Shore Drive Apartments in “High Rise,” Detroit's Lafayette Park in “City Landscape,” and finally the “Event Space” of the National Gallery in Berlin—all of them among the most influential building projects of the 20th century. Numerous drawings from MoMA's vast holdings are published here for the first time, and even the well-known illustrations look fresh and immediate, thanks to their size and quality of reproduction.
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