The Brooklyn Rail

“We reject any aesthetic speculation, any doctrine and any formalism.” 
–Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

A constantly shifting surface, like the skin of a snake, conceals the true essence of things, blurring them in a perpetual camouflage of fashions and styles, tastes and trends. Mies strips away this skin, revealing the skeletal structure, muscles, and mechanisms that enable movement beneath.

Starting from postmodern society, the diversification of consumption has accelerated product life cycles, embodying the so-called planned obsolescence, driven by both technical and social factors. Architecture mirrors these new economic and social trends, becoming something undefined and ever-changing, locked in an eternal flow of construction and dissolution. Buildings are obsolete the moment they are completed, already primed for replacement. Generic structures are designed as hardware, ready to host an endless stream of software updates.

Space, as we once understood it, is dead. Spatial experience has been replaced by aesthetic experience guided by economic and moral inclinations, momentary and forgettable, lost within the constant stream of countless other impressions. Aesthetic cacophony.

In a landscape of commodified, disposable architecture, Mies’s approach underlines the necessity of grounding design in something more substantial than the whims of momentary taste. His work transcends styles and historical contingencies, aiming to create a free space that feels eternal. Yet Mies’s approach to timelessness doesn’t rely on the concept of generic space or the “big box” of undefined possibilities. Instead, it achieves this through architecture with powerful spatial and structural characteristics, so archetypal and primordial that they remain perpetually fitting. Its value acquires strength over time—this is the first code Mies give us. There is nothing more contemporary than to make buildings that last. Mies’s architecture appears as a relic, a magical object passed down through generations, embracing different beliefs, yet retaining its aura.

Dark, laconic oracle with cutting aphorisms, hard-edged and mysterious, Mies van der Rohe crafted a sharply defined, calculated, and distilled image of himself throughout his life. His rare public appearances and limited writings have left an ostensibly sparse theoretical legacy. Historical accounts of his figure tend to focus on his constructions, often overlooking the intellectual dimension of the architect, which is essential to fully understanding his works. An avant-garde architect, theorist, and builder, Mies weighed every word with the precision of a brick’s placement; each structural element rests upon a clear, defined thought.

Rediscovering Mies’s philosophy is thus essential to interpreting his works not merely as references to forms or construction techniques, but as ideas that transcend their time and resonate with relevance in our current historical context. Understanding the fundamental ideas behind his work—not just their images—allows us to engage more deeply with his legacy.

Mies in His Own Words, edited by Vittorio Pizzigoni and Michelangelo Sabatino, takes up the challenge of revealing this hidden side of one of the great masters of construction. Behind the material lies the idea, the abstract, the thought. Their book catalogs, translates, and presents the body of Mies's writings and interventions that make up his intellectual heritage. This volume owes much to Fritz Neumeyer’s earlier work, The Artless Word, which sought for the first time to present a comprehensive reading of Mies's historical figure and the reasons behind his physical works.

Only questions to the essence of things are meaningful. The answers a generation finds to these questions are its contribution to architecture … To make meaningful steps in architecture, one should ask profound questions of philosophical matters to contribute to the purest architecture discipline.

In the eighteenth century, architecture lost its essence. There were no more questions, no answers. Europe hid behind the vestiges of a once glorious, but now faded, past. Nothing new was meant to be created; it became a copy of a copy of a copy, architectural sampling and imitation. Ancient buildings, removed from their original context, were displayed in European capitals like relics looted for history museums. The Panthéon in Paris, completed in 1790.

In the beginning of twentieth century, while the architectural world was still blocked, an earthquake was destroying, erasing, and tearing apart all preconceived values in philosophy and culture. The rejection of the old brought the question of the new. In Mies's eyes, architecture could not be viewed as an isolated phenomenon but only part of a Weltanschauung—not an autonomous discipline, but a reflection of the world, of a society. Architecture needed its reinvention.

In 1921, Mies participated in a competition for a tower in Berlin— a twenty-floor glass skyscraper, a radical entry presented in two versions. Met with complete non-comprehension by the jury and dismissed as a utopian joke, the glass skyscrapers were setting their own standards, exploring new construction methods and materials, embracing an aesthetic unrelated to any historical forms. Traditional massiveness was overcome, and the standard facade dematerialized into a transparent veil, revealing the ghost of what was soon to come. Radical to the bone, rejecting both traditionalism and modernism, and erasing stereotypes in academic circles. Styles of the past were over; an essential, forward-looking approach was rising. What could have been built one-hundred years ago could still be relevant today—historical eclecticism walking backward.

What truly mattered to Mies was not the technical potential or the image of construction, but the act of placing the very essence itself on display: mathematical logic, a manifestation of scientific clarity. Building becomes pure and objective, devoid of ornament or superficial cladding often applied at completion. This “naked” construction represents what Mies defined as an “architecture of honesty.” After stripping away appearances, what remained was archetypal structure.

The architecture of appearances was replaced by an architecture of being.

In 1912, a new German translation of Leon Battista Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture was published, a transformative reading for Mies. The text warns against literal copying of historical examples and instead advocates for the assimilation of the artistic intent behind architecture. Vittorio Pizzigoni and Michelangelo Sabatino’s book on Mies similarly offer us a parallel reflection. The foundation of architecture lies within a theoretical layer, an idea that ultimately justifies its formal results.

An architecture space that exists both in the past and in the future because it belongs to a universal law, the one of the idea. I quote Mies: “The spiritual goal was a necessity for me, even if many people see only the object and not the idea.”