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It was these five projects, this “paper architecture,” together with the publicity apparatus enveloping them that first made Mies into a historical figure. The houses that he had built so far, and that he would continue to develop during the same years, would have taken him nowhere. While the Riehl house of 1907 was noted by a critic and published in Moderne Bauformen and in Innen Dekoration in 19102, between the somewhat modes articles about this house and Mies’ own article presenting the glass skyscraper in Frühlicht in 19223, nothing else of Mies’s work was published.
Could we attribute this silence, these 12 years of silence, to the blindness of architectural critics of his time, as some historians seem to imply? Mies’s attitude is much more clear. In the mid-1920s he destroyed the drawings of most of his work prior to that time, thereby constructing a very precise image of himself from which all incoherencies had been erased. (Note the parallelism with Loos, who destroyed all the documents from his projects when he left Vienna for Paris in 1922, and with Le Corbusier, who excluded all his early houses in La Chaux-de-Fonds from publication in his Oeuvre complète.) Still in 1947, Mies did not allow Philip Johnson to publish his early work in the monograph that Johnson was preparing as catalog for the first “comprehensive retrospective” exhibition of Mies’ work at the Museum of Modern Art, and that would constitute the first book on him. “Not enough of a statement,” Mies is supposed to have said about some early houses that Johnson wanted to include. Mies excluded all his more traditional early work up to 1924, with the exception of the project for the unbuilt Kröller-Müller house of 1912- 1913, which symptomatically was only a photograph of the 1:1 cloth and cardboard model that was built on the site to try to persuade the client.
Mies’s work is a text book case of a wider phenomenon. Modern architecture became “modern” not as it is usually understood by using glass, steel, or reinforced concrete, but by engaging with the media: with publications, competitions, exhibitions. The materials of communication were used to rebuild the house. With Mies this is literally the case. What had been a series of rather conservative domestic projects realized for real clients became in the context of the Berlin Art Exhibition, of G, of Frühlicht and so on, a series of manifestos of modern architecture.
2 Anton Jaumann “Architect L. Mies, Villa des
Prof. Dr. Riehl in Neubabelsberg” Moderne Bauformen 9, 1910,
pp. 42-48 and “Vom Kunstlerischen Nachwuchs Haus Riehl”, Innendekoration 21, July 1910, pp. 266-273.
3 Mies van der Rohe. “Hochhäuser”, Frühlicht 1, 4, 1922, pp. 122-124