BRICK COUNTRY

9 HOUSE PROJECT
Mies van der Rohe

George Dodds

Mies van der Rohe, Brick Country House, circa 1924.*

The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume IV, Twentieth-Century Architecture.

Edited by David Leatherbarrow and Alexander Eisenschmidt.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
At times, the image of a building attains a status above and beyond the physical
artifact represented, wherein the depiction of what could have been is given equal
status to or privileged over what was built. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s oeuvre is
chockablock with such instances – both intentional and not. The canonical Berliner
Bild-Bericht photographs of his German Pavilion for the Barcelona International
Exposition (1928–29) are the most celebrated of these, while the drawings of his
“Project for a Brick Country House” are arguably the most influential of his early
Weimar experiments (1921–25).1 Yet, typical of the uncertainty that surrounds
much of Mies’ avant-garde work of the 1920s, little is known with certainty of
the genesis of the brick villa project: not its client, if there was one; not its site,
if there was one; not even the year in which the drawings were made. Moreover,
while they have influenced generations of architects, their resonance in Mies’ own
architectural production is relatively limited, and short-lived.
Only two drawings attributable to Mies’ Berlin office describe the project: a
spare plan, largely absent annotations, and a perspective. Neither existed for very
long; no one seems to know what became of them. It is equally unclear how many
of those who have written about them since the 1920s have done so from first-hand
inspection. No one living today has laid eyes on them. Further complicating the
matter, the perspective (which does not appear to have been drawn by Mies) seems
to have been generated from a different plan. Once there may have been a pair of
drawings that aligned better; we will never know. Wolf Tegethoff has carefully
parsed this lack of internal coherence, one that has troubled far fewer authors than
it ought.2 Yet, even the exacting Tegethoff wanders into the tall grass on more than
one occasion as he attempts to will these drawings into the coherent form of a proj-
ect with both a site and client.3 In a more recent commentary, Dietrich Neumann
includes a description of the second floor, down to the number of bedrooms.4 As
there has apparently never been a plan of an upper level, or a section, and as the
outside depicted in the perspective does not align with the inside delineated in the
plan, this ought to make one wonder.5 Describing an interior, which is immeasur-
able, based on the relation of a plan to a perspective, which do not agree in ways
that are clearly measurable, is a dicey proposition. Yet, this is simply one of the
several “phantasies and unconscious logic” projected onto these relatively mute
and absent documents.6
There are, however, a few critical moments in the history of the Berlin drawings
of the Brick Country House Project that one can point to with varying degrees of
certainty. It seems more than likely that Mies created the drawings specifically for
The Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1924. It is certain that they were hung in the
show well after the exhibit opened. The timing of the late entry has led to specu-
lation that Mies made the drawings partly in response to what was already on dis-
play.7 Adding to the historical uncertainty, two additional versions of the plan were
produced in Mies’ Chicago office in the mid-1960s, ostensibly with his imprimatur,
and specifically for Werner Blaser’s Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure (1965),
 Brick Country House Project 3

wherein each brick of every wythe is visible.8 Blaser’s crisp and clear “reconstruc-
tions” (1964 and 1965) only confound the matter; although they were created from
Mies’ photograph of the drawings exhibited in the Berlin exhibition, they differ
from “the original” in terms of enclosure and construction.9
That the status of the missing drawings has troubled few who have written
about them is illustrative of a cultural phenomenon that is commonplace.10 This
gap between what was and what may have been, however, is a telling characteristic
of architectural discourse on Mies van der Rohe’s oeuvre in particular. At the
Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Mies in Berlin exhibition (June 21 – September
11, 2001), for example, the large format photographic print of the drawings were
hung alongside Mies’ original architectural drawings, montages, and photographs
of his built works – on equal terms, as if they were all originals. The aura of an
authentic work notwithstanding, there is simply far more to be learned from an
original drawing than there is from the finest reproduction: the substrate and
graphic medium, traces of the drawing’s construction, the maker’s pentimenti,
marginal notes, not to mention the obverse side on which one may find revealing
graphic and textual notations.11 None of these are available in the case of Mies’
Brick Country House drawings; that path is closed.
The open path is limited to photographic reproductions of varying quality. And
while we can learn nothing from the original drawings, there is much to be learned
from the manner in which they have been reproduced. Hans Soeder’s 1924 article
published in Der Neubau seems to be the first publication of the two brick villa draw-
ings exhibited at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition.12 The following year Hans Rich-
ter and Paul Westheim each published the Der Neubau drawings in articles.13 The
caption in the Westheim article, published in Das Kunstblatt, refers to the project as
“a house for the architect.”14 The combined effect of Westheim’s caption, an anno-
tation of “Neubabelsberg” on the plan, and a brief comment by Mies in a contem-
poraneous letter in which he evinced an interest in a parcel of land, prompted
Tegethoff to conclude that the drawings were originally made for a client with
a site in mind, suggesting that only later did Mies decide to develop the project
for himself.15
But the most important publication of Mies’ brick villa may have been in Alfred
Barr’s pioneering Cubism and Abstract Art (1936). Barr, the founding director of
MoMA in New York, included the Der Neubau plan, oriented vertically, alongside
a reproduction of Theo van Doesburg’s Rhythms of Russian Dance (1918). Barr asserts:

Mies van der Rohe’s plan for a country house…done in 1922 [sic], a year after
Doesburg’s arrival in Berlin, may be compared with Doesburg’s painting Russian
dance [sic]…of 1918. The resemblance is obvious and by no means superficial.
The broken, asymmetrical, orthogonal character of the plan was a direct result of
Doesburg’s sojourn in Berlin in 1921 and ’22, at which time he publicized not merely
the paintings of the Stijl but the work of its architects as well.16
4 The Modern Project

Barr concludes: “In the history of art there are few more entertaining sequences
than the influence by way of Holland of the painting of a Spaniard [Picasso] living in
Paris upon the plans of a German architect in Berlin – and all within twelve
years.”17 The pairing of these two figures, Mies and van Doesburg (and connecting
Mies with Picasso), establishes the legitimacy of Mies as an avant-garde artist of
international renown far beyond what he was able to achieve, up to that point,
from his short-lived association with the G Group, his directorship of the Bauhaus
during its declining years in Dessau and Berlin, or his self-promotion.18 More
importantly, the pairing of these two graphic works, each emerging from funda-
mentally different programs, relegitimizes for a new generation the old model
of the spatial, figural, and emotive qualities of two-dimensional artwork as the
experimental basis for new directions in architectural production: specifically,
the lawfulness of equating the qualities of the two-dimensional canvas art of ana-
lytical and synthetic cubism onto the architect’s productive task. Perhaps most
influential of all, largely through the strategic use of black-and-white photographic
reproduction with the intimation of a scientific method through comparative anal-
ysis, Barr directs the reader to apprehend a painting and an architectural plan on
equal terms; they are different only in degree, not in kind.
Two years after Barr’s MoMA exhibition and publication, Siegfried Giedion
delivered his Norton Lectures at Harvard, published as Space, Time, and Architecture
(1941), in which he leaned heavily on Barr to bolster his characterization of analyt-
ical cubism and its relation to architectural production.19 No doubt emboldened by
Barr’s comparative technique, Giedion constructed several now-famous graphic
juxtapositions in Space, Time, and Architecture, among them the comparison of
the Piazza del Popolo in Rome (as seen from the Pincio) to van Doesburg’s Relation
of Horizontal and Vertical Planes (1920), and of Picasso’s L’Arlésienne (1911) to a pho-
tograph of a corner of Gropius’ Dessau Bauhaus building (1926).20
By the time Giedion was delivering the bulk of his lectures and preparing his text
for publication, Mies had immigrated to the United States, relocated his practice to
Chicago, and was installed as the director of the architecture program at the newly
formed Armour Institute of Technology, soon to be IIT. Nonetheless, Mies’ entire
career is largely absent from Giedion’s epoch-defining book; the Brick Country
House Project appears as a fragmented footnote.21 By the third edition (1954), how-
ever, no longer able to elide Mies’ growing oeuvre and reputation, Giedion created
a new section for the book, “Mies van der Rohe and the Integrity of Form,” which
included several richly illustrated pages devoted to the brick and concrete villa pro-
jects; these he valorized as “of inestimable importance for the development of mod-
ern architecture.” For the Giedion of the third edition, these projects are not
grounded in the analytic cubism of L’Arlésienne, but rather in the synthetic cubism
of postwar Europe: “cubism’s happiest [period].”22 Advancing the book’s subtitle,
“The Growth of a New Tradition,” Giedion posits: “Cubism originated among
artists belonging to the oldest cultures of the western world.”23 Listing the key
figures – Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, Malewitsch [Malevich], Moholy-Nagy,
 Brick Country House Project 5

Mondrian, and van Doesburg – Giedion asserts: “More and more clearly it appears
that this new conception of space was nourished by the elements of bygone per-
iods.”24 Having established its place in an unbroken lineage, Giedion explains how
these architects and artists were exploring ways to make cubism, and its several
derivations, operational. “The analytical spirit of Theo van Doesburg had enabled
[Mies] to show by means of his transparent architectural drawings that the concep-
tion of the house as a self-contained cube had lost its meaning. In [the concrete and
brick country villa] studies, Mies van der Rohe gives this conception a clear and
concentrated artistic expression.”25 For Giedion, Mies’ experimental country house
projects are perhaps the clearest demonstrations of the avant-garde operationa-
lized, albeit unrealized.
Another overlooked yet potent aspect of Barr’s reproduction of the Der Neubau
plan in Cubism and Abstract Art relates back to its cardinal orientation. By rotating
the plan 90 , Barr not only underscores the visual correspondence between Mies’
plan and the van Doesburg painting, but no less importantly, by redacting the per-
spective, he frees the plan from the literalness of a projected architectural form.
What once signified the architect’s intension to extend the horizontal plane of
the dwelling out beyond the normative boundaries of an intimated interior to
an as yet undefined exterior world, is reduced to a graphic diagram of dark and
light marks, absent scale or any suggestion of dwelling. Abstraction is, after all,
Barr’s main concern. The architectural plan of neo-plastic origin, reoriented much
like Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” or Meret Opperheim’s “Fur Lined Tea Cup,” is
de-familiarized and reinvented into a highly plastic icon, readily reproduced in any
number of contexts, ready to accrete new meanings and associations.
Barr’s rhetorical and graphic technique immediately resonated with a wide
range of artists and designers, including a small but influential core of young land-
scape architects. The year Giedion delivered his Norton Lectures, James C. Rose re-
published the van Doesburg painting alongside the Der Neubau plan (again rotated
90 ) in his groundbreaking article, “Freedom in the Garden,”26 only this time it was
the van Doesburg painting that was laid on its side, to render a more “landscape”
orientation, while the Der Neubau plan was reproduced according to its original
datum, albeit with the perspective once again deleted. Rose made no reference
to the plan in his text, however, citing instead Brancusi’s sculpture as the model
for his newly found freedom. Expelled from Harvard the previous year, the
recently freed Rose argued that to be unfettered by outdated Beaux Arts practices
(read Harvard’s landscape program), contemporary landscape architecture must be
reconceived as “outdoor sculpture, not to be looked at as an object, but designed to
surround us in a pleasant sense of space relations.”27 Rose was not unique, but he
was one of the first to build upon the order of things according to Barr; most of the
illustrations in the Rose article were lifted from Barr’s book.28 By the end of the
next half-century, when museums and historians were celebrating Mies van der
Rohe’s centenary, the number of similarly artful provocations, ingenious associa-
tions, and erroneous attributions, became legion.
6 The Modern Project

As we cannot study the Brick Country House directly, and as virtually all we
know about the project is limited to its photographic reproduction and a few scant
texts, it seems fitting to register the magnitude of its reception indirectly, vis-à-vis
compendiums used in standard survey courses, wherein students of architecture
encounter it as a copy, copied. Three such surveys, separated by decade-long pub-
lication intervals, help illustrate the retelling of the Brick Country House story.
Kenneth Frampton, in Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1992), refers to the
Brick Country House only in passing, as a demonstration of Mies’ reinterpretation
of Wright’s “pinwheel plan,” reworked through “the sensibility of the G group.”29
A redrawn and simplified version of the Der Neubau plan, absent the perspective,
illustrates his text. Frampton concludes: “As Alfred Barr observed, the load-bearing
walls of Mies’ brick country house were disposed in a pinwheel fashion like the
clustering elements of Van Doesburg’s painting of 1917 [sic], Rhythms of Russian
Dance.”30
Alan Colquhoun, in Modern Architecture (2002), adds a new term (and period) to
the already crowded Mies lexicon: for Colquhoun, the brick and concrete villas are
part of Mies’ “Constructivist projects.”31 Colquhoun illustrates his argument with a
redrawn and diagrammatic Der Neubau plan, which is now part of a tripartite com-
parison of two other simplified plans of unbuilt projects: Mies’ Concrete Country
House (1923), and the Lessing House (1923). In a relatively brief passage, Colqu-
houn conflates a diagram of an unrealized plan with an actual building, while dis-
closing that in order to equate an architectural experience with a two-dimensional
representation, one must first reduce the architecture to little more than a graphic
“pattern.”32
In The Future of Architecture since 1889 (2012), Jean-Louis Cohen groups the coun-
try house projects alongside Mies’ other important works of the early 1920s, several
of which were actually built, under the heading, “Mies van der Rohe’s Theoretical
Projects.”33 Following Barr, Cohen illustrates his text with the Der Neubau plan
alone, absent the perspective. For Cohen, the import of the brick villa, which
he considers “more provocative” than its earlier concrete counterpart, is the role
it played in Mies’ much later design for the German Pavilion in Barcelona: “The
latent fluidity of his Brick Country House began to be palpable in [the German
Pavilion’s] sequence of open rooms.”34 Yet, neither the Barcelona Pavilion, nor
Mies’ brick villa, are known for their “rooms.”
The varied re-presentations of the Brick Country House story and its drawings
notwithstanding, these graphic documents – photographically copied, rotated, edi-
ted, and redrawn – continue to incite the imaginations of scholars and practitioners
alike, most recently evinced in Shigeru Ban’s realized country house in Sagaponac,
Long Island (2006), consciously based on Mies’ brick villa drawings. While the role
the brick villa project played in Mies’ later projects for Barcelona and Brno remains
unclear, that of its photographic reproduction, variously registered in twentieth-
century modernism, does not.
 Brick Country House Project 7

The brick villa project occupied the center of five years of fundamental exper-
imentation in Mies’ career, beginning in 1921, a watershed year for the architect.
Substantial changes in his private life – not least of which was his separation from
his wife Ada and his two children – set the stage for him to reinvent his public
image and private practice (or at least part of it). An important part of this reinven-
tion (one of several in a long and varied life) was signified by the addition of “van
der Rohe,” in 1921, to his family name.35 Well-equipped to live a highly compart-
mentalized life, in relatively short order he emerged as one of the leaders of the
European avant-garde, as he maintained a practice producing relatively conven-
tional domestic designs for his upper-middle class clients. Following his project
for the Friedrichstraße competition (1921), he became the director of exhibitions
for the Novembergruppe. During this relatively narrow window of opportunity,
in addition to the Friedrichstraße project and the two country house studies, he
produced an extraordinary group of projects: the curvaceous Glass Skyscraper Proj-
ect (1922); a Concrete Office Building (1923); the Lessing House (1923); and a Traf-
fic Tower (1924) – all unbuilt. Among his more adventurous realized works from
this period were his Monument to the November Revolution (1925–26) and the
remarkable Wolf House (1925–27), both built in brick but neither of which sur-
vived the war. Apparently, neither did the Der Neubau drawings of the brick villa.
The question remains: what do the Der Neubau reproductions of the brick villa
drawings represent and what can we learn from them? What do they document,
and what do they depict? For Barry Bergdoll, they document how thoroughly Mies
had engaged the Wohnreform, or “Residential Reform” movement in Germany.36
Simultaneously with the Wohnreform, Hermann Muthesius mounted his campaign
through the publication of Stilarchitektur und Baukunst (1902), in which he opened a
window onto a new culture – its arts, crafts, and architecture – one that embraced
mechanization as the gateway to a new and modern Germany, a new way of living
in a new century.37 In contrast to Ruskin and Morris in England, Muthesius argued
in Stilarchitektur und Baukunst that machines could be extensions of the hand. They
were not the end of hand craft; they empowered it. Mechanization posed no threat
to the cozy tranquility upon which German domestic life was founded. Part of
Muthesius’ brilliance resided in his recognition that this quest must begin, not
in city plans, office towers, department stores, or cafés, but in the home. As Peter
Collins outlined in Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture (1750–1950):

[The] villa…once it was adopted as the favourite type of dwelling for the newly
enriched merchants and industrialists…became a medium for expressing architectur-
ally many of the most powerful aspiration of the age…. Not only at the beginning of
the modern era, but throughout the whole period from 1750–1950, architectural the-
ory was dominated by factors more strictly appropriate only to domestic architecture;
and it is by no means coincidental that the most influential architectural pioneers of
the present century, such as Wright, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier,
8 The Modern Project

originally gave expression to their theories by building either villas for wealthy connois-
seurs or, after the 1918 war, modest dwellings for artisans and impecunious artists. The
romantic suburban villa was not so much a minor building-type characteristic of the early
nineteenth century, as a paradigm for the architecture of a whole age.38

Once mechanized craft is welcomed into the home, other doors soon open. In
Landhaus und Garten (1907/1910), Muthesius envisioned a new German domestic
life in which discrete interior life directly extended into corresponding exterior
spaces: “If the house belongs to architecture, the garden must also.”39 The walls
of the home did not dictate the limits of domesticity. Rather, they facilitated the
extension of the private and precisely coded interior living space into the garden.
Mies’ Riehl house ostensibly demonstrated this so well that Muthesius included it
in the second edition of Landhaus und Garten.40 But, in the Der Neubau plan of the
brick villa, discrete reciprocity between explicitly coded interiors and geometri-
cized exterior spaces is effaced. For Peter Behrens, the garden of the Landhaus,
defined by hedgerows and pergolas that enclosed room-like terraces, “is as an
essential part of a dwelling as a bathroom is.” This “spiritually purifying union with
nature … has been given form by our desires … that leads to inner harmony.”41 In
the Der Neubau plan, this “union with nature” is moot. For Behrens and Muthesius,
the relation of the domestic interior and exterior garden was essential, but inside
and outside remained different in kind. In the brick villa drawings, the difference is
one of degree: a carefully crafted ambiguity. The disposition of spaces in the brick
villa is generic, even vague, absent any semblance of the “coziness” Muthesius
recognized as central to the German domestic culture. One is left to imagine
how, and even where, one would dwell. Mies’ response to the need for craft
and the comfort of home was limited to his choice of materials. The concrete villa
was cold and empty; the brick villa is empty but warm, or at least warmer. Part of
the genius of the brick villa is that it was imagined in brick: a retardataire material
(for the avant-garde) put to work to advance a radically new vision of domesticity.
The precise relation of interior to exterior is anyone’s guess. The drawings for
the brick villa represent an inside with no outside. Nonetheless, Bergdoll observes
of the villa project: “famous for its abolition of roomlike enclosures … [t]his vocab-
ulary continues outside the house to create a series of outdoor ‘rooms’ of unprec-
edented grandeur and openness to the landscape.”42 Later in the same essay: “The
line of the garden wall in the foreground of the perspective view of the Brick Coun-
try House severs any continuity between our space and the representational space
of the image, even as it draws a boundary between the garden and the broader
landscape.”43 In addition to descriptions of non-existent terraces and gardens,
and their relation to an unknowable “landscape,” Bergdoll describes how the villa’s
glazed openings, from the interior, “selectively frame the landscape, not creating a
seamless relation to the outdoors but pictorializing key views.”44 Yet, this Landhaus
is absent a specific site, cardinal orientation, or any specificity of the ground plane
 Brick Country House Project 9

with a material surface (interior or exterior), not to mention “key views.” In short,
this Landhaus has no land. In both plan and perspective, the exterior is effaced.
The scholarship on Mies amassed during the last two decades reverberates with
the Giedion-like premise that for Mies to have envisioned a new architecture, it
must have been a “New Tradition,” – an outgrowth of long-held values from
the “oldest cultures of the western world,” and “bygone periods.”45 There is com-
fort in the idea of Mies’ work being an extension of a nineteenth-century agenda,
one that begins with Schinkel, is reconfigured by, among others, Muthesius and
Behrens, and is subsequently reimagined in Mies’ avant-garde work. Mies offers
us no comfort, however in his new domestic visions, projected or constructed.
In stark contrast to Muthesius and Behrens, and Schinkel before them, Mies’ image
of domesticity does not accommodate the exigencies of dwelling; it offers no pro-
tection. It does not quarter: it challenges.
As an inside with no outside, the brick villa is one of many Mies projects and
buildings that have a dubious relationship with their site, imagined or physical.
It has been argued of late that the “received view” of Mies’ architecture as largely
autonomous of its site can be traced to misguided or ideologically driven agitprop
in which the garden exteriors (or context) of his projects were purposely deleted.46
In these recent revisions, such iconic works as the New National Gallery in Berlin
(1962–68) is argued to be not only highly site-specific, but also unjustly character-
ized as inhospitable to the display of art.47 That successful exhibitions have been
mounted in the gallery, however, is hardly a cogent argument that the gallery
is particularly well suited to display art.
The same site-specific argument has been made for Mies’ German Pavilion for
Barcelona. In the end, however, it was not the building that appeared to fuse with
its site, as Wolf Tegethoff argued, but the black-and-white abstract tonal patterns of
the pavilion’s marble perimeter wall and the coniferous trees beyond, depicted in
the canonical Berliner Bild-Bericht prints.48
In most of the scholarship on Mies’ brick villa project, since his centenary, there
is a clear tendency to site it on a parcel of land in Potsdam, to make it into a “real”
rather than a hypothetical project. This desire speaks volumes about the traditions
upon which much of the recent literature on Mies is based. Just as many who inter-
pret Mies’ later work seem compelled to imbue it with a conceptual richness often
difficult to find in the built artifact, these same interlocutors seem compelled to
retroactively transform scant drawings, photographs, and models, through com-
pound and complex hypotheticals, as if to elevate “merely” provocative specula-
tions into intended realizations. In part, this desire is fueled by a certain view of
Mies as master builder – even the Mies of the early 1920s who had built relatively
little and nothing approaching the exhilarating country house cousins. That Mies’
most influential works are arguably those produced during his G Group years,
along with unbuilt projects or realized works that no longer survive, does little
to deter an argument that remains central to much of the Mies literature.
10 The Modern Project

What then is to be learned from the remaining photo-fragments of Mies’ brick

villa, saturated as they are “with meaning, along with their phantasies and uncon-
scious logic”? Since Alfred Barr redacted, reconfigured, and represented the Brick
Country House project to an American audience in 1936, it has become part of
“an anthropological dream … existing … above and beyond … symbolic
exchange.”49 A kind of “hyperreality,” to borrow another of Baudrillard’s concepts,
has long permeated the literature on Mies van der Rohe, particularly since his cen-
tenary. The Der Neubau drawings for the Brick Country House, saturated as they
have been with ever-altering meanings, help us better understand the nature of
the anthropological dream they represent. Akin to the photographic space depicted
in the Berliner Bild-Bericht prints of the Barcelona Pavilion, the Der Neubau drawings
are the most curious kind of simulacrum – one for which there is no original. As
Shigeru Ban demonstrates in his country house in Sagaponac, there seems no limit
to where they can take one, or what one can attribute to them. Their continued
power to incite “phantasies and unconscious logic” resides less in what they docu-
ment, than in what they depict. The photographs of Mies’ drawings for a Brick Coun-
try House tell us more about what we want them to be, than what they were to have
been. They tell us less about the world made than they do about the world we would
make.

Notes

* With kind permission from Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim.

1. See George Dodds, Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (London: Routledge, 2005):
passim. Also see George Dodds, “The Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion,”
RES, Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 39 (Spring 2001): 168–91.
2. See Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1985): 37–41.
3. Tegethoff argues that the Brick Country House project, along with Mies’ earlier project
for a concrete country house, can no longer be considered theoretical or utopian, but
“real.” He bases his argument on three main points: 1) there may have been a client,
owing in part to a letter from Mies in the MoMA architectural archive, which has led
Tegethoff (and since then many others) to speculate that Mies himself may have been
the client; 2) an inscription of a location on the drawing that Mies apparently knew quite
well; 3) the specificity of the concrete project and the similarities between the brick and
concrete versions, suggesting that they were both for the same project and that it was far
too developed to be merely theoretical; Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe, 15–51. This is dis-
cussed later in this chapter. Also see Wolf Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity: Mies
van der Rohe’s Breakthrough to Modernism,” in Mies van der Rohe: Critical Essays, ed.
Franz Schulze (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989): 90, n. 78. For example,
Detlef Mertins begins his essay, “Ester and Lange Houses: New Language” simply stat-
ing: “Long believed to have been a theoretical exercise, without a client or specific site,
[the Project for a Brick Country House] now appears to have been another project for
 Brick Country House Project 11

himself, like his House for the Architect (1914), this time for a site in Postdam-Neuba-
blesberg”; see Detlef Mertins, Mies (New York: Phaidon, 2014): 92. Curiously, Mertins’
source is Dietrich Neumann’s un-footnoted extended caption for the Der Neubau
drawings in Mies in Berlin, and not Teghetoff. See Dietrich Neumann, “Project for a
Brick Country House,” in Mies in Berlin, ed. Terrance Riley and Barry Bergdoll
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001): 194.
4. Ibid.
5. Neumann infers the imaginary layout from the location of a stair in the first floor plan,
and the volumetrics intimated by the massing and fenestration evinced in the perspec-
tive; email exchange with Dietrich Neumann, August 10, 2012.
6. See Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988): 19.
7. See Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe, 43.
8. See Werner Blaser, Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure (New York: Praeger, 1965).
9. See Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe, 42–4. There are, of course, other equally influential
and no less erroneous plans of Mies’ seminal Weimar work, drawn under the archi-
tect’s supervision in Chicago. See George Dodds, Building Desire, 129–30.
10. Ivan Illich has called this phenomenon Bildwelt (a universe of images) which he juxta-
poses to Weltbild (an image of the universe). Illich’s neologism of Bildwelt occurs, for
example, when a legion of images is available to us in a search engine’s millisecond, far
more than one can apprehend, let alone study.
11. The Mies in Berlin compendium to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition of
the same name, is an excellent case in point. It contains several high quality reproduc-
tions of the brick villa drawings, yet they vary substantially in quality and clarity; even
in the same book, one’s apprehension of these images can vary widely owing to the
particulars of their reproduction. Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, ed., Mies in Berlin
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001), passim.
12. Hans Soeder, “Architecktur auf der Grossen Berliner Kunstausstellung 1924,” Der Neubau
6, no.13 (1924): 153–8.
13. Hans Richter, “Der neue Baumeister,” Qualität 4, no. 1/2 (January/February, 1925): 3–9.
14. Paul Westheim, “Mies van der Rohe: Entwicklung eines Architekten,” Das Kunstblatt 9,
no. 4 (April, 1925): 110. Also see Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity,” 90, n. 78.
15. See Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe, 15–51.
16. Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1936): 156.
17. Ibid. Barr also juxtaposes Gabo’s, “Monument for an Airport” (1925–26) with Berthold
Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool at the London Zoo (1935); ibid., 139.
18. See Werner Gräff, “Concerning the So-Called G Group,” Art Journal 23 (Summer,
1964): 280–2.
19. Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 433; ibid. (1956): 435.
20. Ibid., 155.
21. Absent any illustration, Giedion refers to Mies as a “German architect – one of the few
whose early work reflects Wright’s influence without either being absorbed by it or
reducing it to a merely decorative use – [who] developed the ‘windmill’ plan in several
12 The Modern Project

of his schemes.” In a footnote he expands: “Project for a brick house in 1922,” presum-
ably referring to the brick country house; Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 327.
22. Ibid. (1956): 435.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 545.
26. James C. Rose, “Freedom in the Garden: A Contemporary Approach in Landscape
Design,” Pencil Points (October, 1938): 639–41. Rose attempts to relate avant-garde
art explicitly to landscape design. “The Constructivists probably have the most to
offer landscape design because their work deals with space relations in volume. The
sense of transparency, and of visibility broken by a secession of planes, as found in
their constructions, if translated into terms of outdoor material, would be an
approach sufficient in itself to free us from the limitation imposed by the axial sys-
tem.” Rose, “Freedom in the Garden,” 642. On further implications in landscape
and garden art, see George Dodds, “Freedom from the Garden: On the Work
of Gabriel Guévrékian,” in Tradition and Innovation in the French Garden Art: Chapters
of a New History, ed. John Hunt and Michel Conan (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2002),
184–202.
27. Rose, “Freedom in the Garden,” 639. Also see Marc Trieb, “Axioms for a Modern Land-
scape Architecture,” in Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review, ed. Marc Tried
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992): 40.
28. Rose’s caption to the reoriented van Doesburg painting and the plan of the Brick Coun-
try House Project speaks for itself: “Recognizable continuity of the contemporary style
from pattern to architecture to landscape, is exemplified in two more illustrations from
Cubism and Abstract Art … They are ‘Russian Dance’ by Doesburg … and a house plan
by Architect Mies van der Rohe.” Ibid.
29. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed. (London: Thames
and Hudson: 1992) 164.
30. Ibid.
31. Alan Colquoun, Modern Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 174.
32. Ibid., 260, n. 27. This is the tactic used by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky in their essay
on phenomenal transparency – flattening out the image of, for example, the Villa Stein
de Monzie at Garches (1927), until one apprehends it as a two dimensional image, dif-
ferent only in degree form the Synthetic Cubist works to which the authors equate it. See
Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” in
Transparency, ed. Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky, and Bernhard Hoesli (Basel: Birkhäuser,
1997): 21–55.
33. Jean-Louis Cohen, The Future of Architecture since 1889 (London: Phaidon, 2012): 148–51.
34. Ibid., 151.
35. Mies would later reinvent himself, first in response to the new political demands of the
Nazi propaganda machine and the exigencies required to keep the Bauhaus operating,
and later, when he emigrated to the United States. Indeed, the design and construction
of the Seagram Building (1958) in New York, his most celebrated large-scale building,
seems the final act of Mies’ quintessentially American reinvention. When negotiating
 Brick Country House Project 13

the logistics of designing Seagram with Phyllis Lambert and Philip Johnson, after it
became clear that Mies would need a younger associated architect in New York, he
unexpectedly suggested to Johnson, “Shall we make it Van der Rohe and Johnson?”
See Phyllis Lambert, Building Seagram (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2013), 36 and 122. Invariably capable of accommodating himself to altering terrain,
to accomplish the design and construction of Seagram, Mies transformed himself
yet again, into the American avatar “van der Rohe,” a suffix never legally acquired
in 1921, but now explicitly adopted in his contract with Johnson. For a discussion
of Mies’ transformation in 1921 and his appropriation of “van der Rohe,” see Franz
Schulz, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985): 104.
36. Barry Bergdoll, “The Nature of Mies’s Space,” in Mies in Berlin, ed. Terence Riley and
Barry Bergdoll (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001): 66–105. See specifi-
cally 67–74.
37. Hermann Muthesius, Stil-architektur und Baukunst (Berlin: 1902), passim. See Hermann
Muthesius, Style-Architecture and Building-Art: Transformations of Architecture in the
Nineteenth Century and its Present Condition (Santa Monica: The Getty Center For the
History of Art, 1994), passim.
38. Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture: 1750–1950 (London: Faber and
Faber, 1965) 42.
39. Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten, 2nd rev. ed. (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1910),
xxv, cited in Bergdoll, “The Nature of Mies’s Space,” 72.
40. Bergdoll, “The Nature of Mies’s Space,” 69.
41. Peter Behrens, “Der Moderne Garten,” Berliner Tageblatt 40, no. 291 (June 10, 1911,
reprint edition, Berlin: Pückler Gesellschaft, 1981) 9. Cited in Bergdoll, “The Nature
of Mies’s Space,” 76. Also see 374, n. 34.
42. Bergdoll, “The Nature of Mies’s Space,” 84.
43. Bergdoll, “The Nature of Mies’s Space,” 84. Also see 375, n, 70. The note refers to
Tegethoff’s observation regarding the status of the photograph of the original
drawing being cut, which seems unrelated to Bergdoll’s assertion. Tegethoff’s com-
mentary regarding the cropping of the print (not the negative as the print in the
MoMA collection is not cropped) is in reference to the assertion that there was an
actual site for the project – indeed, probably the same one as the Concrete Coun-
try House project from the earlier year. It in no way supports invented terraces
and imagined frames of non-existent views for an undisclosed site that probably
does not exist.
44. Bergdoll, “The Nature of Mies’s Space.”
45. Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 435.
46. Bergdoll, “The Nature of Mies’s Space.”
47. Mark Jarzombek, “Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery and the Problem of
Context,” Assemblage 2 (February, 1987): 32–43.
48. See Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe 87., fn. 80.
49. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext(e),
1988): 19.
14 The Modern Project

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