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 Aloof father of corporate minimalism or warm, site-loving genius? Two shows take a fresh look at the Modernist enigma. October 2001
Down in the dirt, construction workers on their lunch hour were playing a vigorous game of Wiffle ball. Transfixed, the visitors stood at the window until they realized what had happened to them. The grimy spectacle had lured them from the refined experience they had bought: a studious afternoon with early Mies van der Rohe, the aloof father of corporate minimalism. When the visitors left, I took over their window space and looked outside. And that's where I finally found the apotheosis of Mies: distraction. That's the point--Mies wants you to look out his windows, past the architecture. It's why he worked so hard reducing his buildings to slivers of metal and stone. But that's not at all how I learned to see Mies. And I'm not alone in that underestimation. Ask any architect over 30 why Mies used so many big panes of glass and he/she might answer: "To express the structural delicacy of the steel frame," or "To enhance the fluidity of universal space." In MoMA's Mies in Berlin book (edited by Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, the show's curators), Rosemarie Haag Bletter's essay on Modernist glass claims that by 1926 the architect switched to "Dionysian, Nietzschean ideas" and used the "glass skin" as "breathing membrane between the organic dwelling and the cosmos." I thought you were supposed to look at a Mies building as if it were a Porsche--a piece of metalwork so beautifully proportioned and precisely detailed it needed no further purpose (or philosophy for that matter). That's why vintage Porsches stay garaged and Mies houses remained unfurnished. Driving a Porsche to the 7-11 would be like filling the Farnsworth house with cushy sofas. Using a Porsche-designed car or Mies-designed villa was not the point. Staring at it--frozen with admiration--was. After that wonderfully useless Mies object the Barcelona Pavilion (built in 1929 for the International Exposition, then razed), was rebuilt in 1986, I went there to gaze. Sitting in a Barcelona chair--and molded by it into a stiff but distinctive angle, I worshipped the building's elegant assembly of machined parts. But I never looked at Barcelona through the Barcelona Pavilion. And, frankly, I wished my fellow tourists had vacated the space and left me alone with the famous chrome columns. As it turns out, enjoying the crowds and looking outside would have been okay. Informed by revisionist theories, MoMA exhibited the Barcelona Pavilion with a site model and drawings that put that icon in a new light. In the MoMA catalog, Claire Zimmerman explains the "shifting status," writing that the pavilion "was championed by modernist critics as the quintessential example of spatial abstraction in architecture, a masterwork independent of context. More recent interpretations, however, have focused less on the object value of the building, emphasizing transactions between building and site, or building and user." Thanks to all this new scholarship, we can now feel free to enjoy all those Mies structures as if they were real buildings--not just plumbed sculpture. Riley and Bergdoll's selections further explain the warmer, site-loving side of Mies. The Tugendhat House (1928--30) includes a roof terrace with pergolas along with a window-side winter garden. A golf club project (1930) has automobiles gliding under canopies. Designs for the Lemke house, the Hubbe house, and a series of modest "court-houses" (1932--35) document Mies's poignant efforts to wrap houses around nature. A different revelation came at the Whitney's Mies in America show, which traced the second half of the man's work. Gradually it became clearer that Mies not only wanted Americans to gawk out the glass but also wanted them to get up out of those leather chairs and move around. A half century ago walking through a Mies building must have felt as exhilarating as driving across the Mojave for the first time watching lone columns of cacti slide past each other, superimposed against a mountain backdrop. Amazing the way emptiness can dramatize motion--especially if the isolation is airy and unfamiliar. Voids were Mies's specialty. He shaped them--but, more significantly, he stretched them out until the boundaries between inside and outside were no longer distinct. The two Mies exhibitions show him refining his notion of universal space--an expanse of indoors liberated from the familiar structure and enclosures (columns and walls) that builders had always used to support roofs and create rooms. For the Resors, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Mies designed a house that spanned a stream and faced the Grand Tetons with huge windows. He used photomontage--a strip of mountain range pasted across a drawing of an interior view--to show how the panorama would zoom right into the living room. But his pencil sketches, drawn from the POV of a real person walking casually through the lower passageways of the house, describe the milder sequence preceding the optical wallop. In 1938, a time when architects still drew buildings as solid boxes pictured from the outside in flat elevations, Mies was trying to do virtual tours with pencil as if storyboarding computer animation. Reading Mies's paperwork--the doodles, study sketches, photomontages, and presentation renderings spread out over two museums--puts the architect in a much rosier light. Maybe he wasn't such a bad guy after all (cigar smoker with dour visage, curt demeanor, and sinister accent who dumped his family, designed torturous chairs, and did a stint as Philip Johnson's living god notwithstanding). As for all the Miesian lies, those invisible inconsistencies underlying all the apparent perfection, isn't that one of the features that makes Modernism so wonderfully naughty? The impossibility of keeping it honest? Granted, the Seagram Building's most famous detail (the I-beam-shaped bronze angles on the facade) is nonstructural decoration. No, Johnson didn't really live solo in his Mies-inspired Glass House; he and his partner slept in a brick house out back. Yes, Mies did live in a Victorian house. And no, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe wasn't really his name--he made it up using Ludwig Mies as a base. The phenomenon of dual Mies immersion not only stimulates fresh opinions about the man--as a better, warmer genius--it raises questions about the design of the two exhibitions, as well as of the two museums themselves. (It's a known fact that the duress of reading architecture exhibits oversensitizes visitors to the actual architecture around them.) Why the Whitney (with its co-organizer, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and its founder Phyllis Lambert, the show's curator) decided to art-direct the retrospective in a contradictory spirit remains a mystery. "If they'd wanted people to hate Mies, they couldn't have done a better job," one visitor said. He mentioned the dim lighting combined with the eerie electronic score emanating from a Mies-themed art film in the next room. But he might also have noted how the bunkered Whitney--with its clunky moat, weighty concrete ceiling, underwindowed walls, and heavy undercirculated air--feels grimmer than the glassy Modern. The contrast makes a good argument, in fact, for the lighter, brighter Miesian brand of Modernism. (There's no accounting for taste, though. One architect friend says MoMA feels like a trendy Euro-mall, whereas the somber Whitney separates real art lovers from the browsers.) At the Whitney, that movie playing the spooky music was In Ordinary Time, a "12-hour performance filmed in one take" created by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, the artist who was also commissioned to design the Mies in America exhibition. It was not the only artist-executed homage; several photographers contributed opinionated work to both exhibits. (At MoMA, Thomas Ruff's photographs served as a reminder that Mies houses still exist, open to interpretation by other artists and available for actual living in, as well.) Of all the artwork, however, Manglano-Ovalle's film was the most dramatic--and the most damaging. The intention was to show "ephemeral" people taking turns standing immobilized inside a "timeless" Mies space, one section of the Neue National Galerie in Berlin, over the course of one time-lapsed day. But in the film, the evil black architecture appears to consume the fleeting people, who disappear like clouds. The whole pointless day is seen from a single fixed camera. That's not the redefined Mies that we're being shown. The beauty of the new Mies is that he lets you make up the architecture as you go along, cinematically, just like a steady-cam. As soon as you begin moving, his empty spaces--so grim when they're static--start to compose themselves into a smooth, continuous vista of shifting planes, changing surfaces, and subtle patterns, colors, reflections, people. If we've learned anything from this Miesian Summer of Love, it's this: when it comes to minimalism, it's not the meat, it's the motion. The Brewers' ballpark creates what Reyner Banham would have called a well-tempered environment. Milwaukee's early and late-season climate can be frigid, but the roof and the fully glazed walls seal the building so that a massive air-handling system can warm the interior as much as 30 degrees above the outside temperature. The Cream City is major-league baseball's smallest market, so the Brewers can't afford to lose patrons to cold weather. Most fans will also like Miller Park for another reason--the shorter outfield fences, as well as warmer temperatures, permit more home runs than the old stadium did. At deadline time, the Brewers were hitting 90 percent more home runs per game at home than they did last year. These are Miller Park's greatest strengths--and they are significant. But by their very nature, large American stadiums are imperfect. The design inevitably involves geometric trade-offs, fast schedules, budgets that don't permit refined detailing and fine flnishes, and a dearth of skilled clients. Miller Park, unlike most of the dozen other post-1989 ballparks, occupies a suburban environment of parking lots and freeways. This dates back to the early 1950s, when County Stadium--Miller Park's underrated predecessor--was built near an abandoned quarry. The resulting fan culture became one of sausage grilling at tailgate parties rather than urban synergy. There was political support, led by Mayor John O. Norquist, for locating County Stadium's replacement downtown, but inertia, along with the Brewers' desire to capture maximum parking revenues and stadium spending, led to it being built a few hundred feet away. This may prove to be a poor long-term decision for the Brewers as well as for the city. Attendance data suggest that ballparks in urban settings draw more fans than those in suburbia. The Brewers wanted a new suburban ballpark, but they wanted it to look like an old urban one. About ten years ago, before the final design team became involved, they released drawings of an oversize, Ebbets fleld--inspired exterior, which was later incongruously combined with an even larger high-tech retractable roof. Ever since, the Miller Park project has embodied a basic design confiict between rationality and subjective nostalgia. The roof and the basic building form that grows from its geometry are symmetrical, but the fleld shape and seating patterns inside are not. This tension grows out of a questionable impulse to emulate vanished 90-year-old ballparks and manufacture character and uniqueness out of whole cloth. But old parks such as Ebbets fleld and the Polo Grounds, and the better retro ones such as Pac Bell Park and Baltimore's Camden Yards, earned their identities legitimately through adaptation to site constraints and opportunities, not through self-conscious and arbitrary asymmetry. Miller's fleld and seating patterns not only have no connection to the qualities of its site, but they are also at odds with the structure they inhabit. The outfield fences have a gratuitous quirkiness. They take ten separate twists and turns, supposedly to create better game action, but really for little reason other than to be "interesting." Some of the classic ballparks had as few as two or three outfield wall segments, and none of them had such a voluntary fussiness. Among today's retro parks, the best outfields have three to six wall planes. Likewise Miller's seats angle in various directions, and the number of rows in the upper deck fluctuates quixotically. Some of the angling improves horizontal sight lines, but that doesn't explain the asymmetry--the alignments along the first and third baselines differ, but surely one of them is better for viewing and should have been the standard. The Brewers claim that in designing the new park, they eliminated County Stadium's 10,000 worst seats and then improved on what was left. Not so. Even with a much smaller seating capacity of 43,000, Miller Park's worst seats are further from the action than those of County Stadium: behind home plate, the first row of the upper deck is more than 40 feet farther from the batter. Most new parks claim to be intimate but are usually larger, despite lower seating capacities. This is due to the lavish space devoted to premium seating--the private suites and exclusive club seats--that form the main impetus to build new ballparks. Still, among the 13 newest parks, Miller Park's upper deck is the second worst in fleld proximity. Most new ballparks claim to eliminate obstructed-view seats. In actuality, they may eliminate views obstructed by columns, but other sight-line problems are created because of stair landings, handrails, and upper-deck geometries. At Miller Park, there are also columns in right fleld and in the upper deck behind home plate, and the lower stands block views of the right and left fleld corners from many seating locations. A more rigorous seating design could have reduced these problems. Given the innovative high-tech roof, one might have expected a modern treatment of the exterior, but the Brewers' desire for nostalgia ruled that out. Meis's exterior design is an honorable attempt to walk the line between postmodernism and uncluttered expression--and is most successful in the facade's upper reaches, where glass supplants brick. Seen from outside, the roof is somewhat awkward, especially where its trusses converge in a crowded way at the home-plate end. Its pivot points and drive mechanisms are hidden rather than celebrated. And, like almost all retractable roofs, it is too big and prominent externally compared to the stadium itself. On paper, this detailed recitation of pros and cons may give the impression that the stadium's failures eclipse its successes. But in execution, Miller Park exceeds the architectural norm for a new baseball stadium: the roof arrangement and internal circulation are outstanding, the scale is properly grand, and the skillful provision of natural light is unsurpassed in a covered ballpark. |
