Mies van der Rohe (The Centric and the Peripheric)

This volume presents anew the influential twentieth-century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose reputation has unfairly languished.

Critics often see him as a chameleon who turned against the vibrant aesthetic culture of Berlin upon emigrating to Chicago and created instead the spare, tectonically obsessed, blank box stylism that looms over so many American downtowns. That prevailing interpretation ignores the aesthetic and conceptual coherence within his oeuvre. Mies often spoke vaguely of a “great form” emerging within modernity. He spent his career seeking to express this condition in the spaces he designed. Through close analysis of over sixty of his buildings and projects, this study reveals that underlying essence. A formal dialectic of center/periphery threads throughout his production, which gives nascent form to the profound societal tensions he sensed. A peculiar interleafing of the centric and the peripheric dominates his shaping of space. Rarely is Mies considered formally.

Using nearly a hundred new analytical diagrams, this book unlocks fresh interrelations between his compositions and between his career’s phases. Unexpected parallels are struck with nineteenth-century Romantic artists like Caspar David Friedrich and with modernists like Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko. The strands within Mies’s deep readings on philosophy are expanded by comparing him with regional thinkers—Kant on the sublime, Novalis on infinity, Kierkegaard on repetition, Freud on the uncanny, Adorno on negation, and Gadamer on hermeneutics. The outlines of the “great form” Mies sensed become clearer. A new and integral Mies emerges, far different from previous interpretations and with enhanced relevance for our contemporary condition. He intuited our pulse and built phenomenological expressions of our societal evolution.