by Sergio Miranda R.
Professor Emeritus Professor PUC
UFT.
the distance, I am pleased to Mies's memory of those years in Crown Hall, as his student, along with another ten or twelve disciples of various nationalities in the Graduate School in Chicago, back in the years 1956 - 1957 .
be inevitable, in this brief and bizarre chronic anecdotes that appear interspersed with some images of his work and thought, as known to all, along with the few personal mementos that might show a closer angle of his tremendous personality.
At that time, as students, we knew it outlined its strong record from the Bauhaus to his arrival in the United States, where he had begun in new areas of the world the development and strengthening of his thought, full of challenges, including was his defense of theoretical principles peer or difficulties with customers as I remember, in the whispering corridors, (although there was Crown Hall corridors), it was said their differences and finally engage the trial that his client, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, due in part to trouble of a more personal, parallel to the office. We said, died of laughter, that the proposed Fox River was the most expensive in office hours I would never have. Maybe that's why architecture recommended not to talk to customers, but rather their children or pets.
Farnsworth House (1945-1951). Perhaps the most minimalist house ever created. Mies van der Rohe (1928) states: "Architecture is the expression that creates the human being against the outside world and how we try to get it. Always reflect the expression of our spiritual decision about the space. "
Gathering in the distance its origins, history and final achievement is now easy to reconstruct the reason for his image as strong, he inspired deep inner nobility and beauty.
important was that he was born and has started within a Catholic family in 1886 in Aachen, a city built upon the Holy Roman Empire in the heart of the Middle Ages. Stonemason's son and himself apprentice.
In "Conversations with Mies" [1] states: "I left school at age 14 had no education ... ... I remember the cathedral built by Charlemagne the octagon ... you saw the original stones ... with only his excellent brick ... actually building clear .... It would have given anything for one of these buildings ".... No wonder that later say .... "God is in the details."
Early on he began to read, and in Berlin ... you were interested in astronomy and natural sciences, but especially so obsessed with the question What is truth? Until I found the answer in Thomas Aquinas [2] ... I worried also another question "What is the order?" ... Found the answer in San AgustÃn [3]:
In 1910 starts his new rotation, change your lifestyle and architectural approaches. We contact the currents of the moment. Is involved in the Bauhaus until its closure in 1933. (Gropius, Itten, Moholy Nagy, Meyer, Mies 22Albers, among others). Mies
finally left in Europe, the tremendous legacy paradigm of contemporary architecture is the Barcelona Pavilion (1929)
Among his first forays into the new culture, Chicago 1938, is concerned about the mass ratio between the built and covered space ... "It should eliminate any unnecessary weight ... the building should be as light as possible." Nearby, Robert you Ricolais launch its motto: "Weight zero, infinite light" ... It was romantic pursuits of all .... Then we say, "the massive bronze mullions of the Seagram Building have to be so big or because it is oversized and must be seen."
Thus we see that the Lever House by Gordon Bunschaft. SOM, a paradigm of High Modernism, which was at the head of Seagram, looked like cellophane.
The teachers we could intuit Mies was a presence of flesh and blood who acted from the premises. It was a great talker, but in his heart he could be suspected was a lonely man. Arrival
Crown Hall, at about 15 hrs. Smoking a big cigar "Montecristo" and, with a far left has been treated to a good cognac desktop. [Mies smiling] It was open, cheerful and talked about everything. A young fellow students and general questions posed to them under the idea perhaps, to dig into the bottom of things, looking towards the meaning of architecture. Measuring the seriousness of the questions and the clarity of the responses and thereby contribute to guess the generation of his disciples. Although he said that education should address the practical level, he insisted that all architecture should be an expression of the spirit of a civilization, where its survival would depend on the expression of the state of technology and the recognition of proportion, because man is the subject of it. This would be eternal.
remember that in his concern to find the lasting, encouraged us to read some works, including one of Samuel Butler: Erewhon (Nowhere), Victorian writer mocked the society of his time, making mockery of machinery , religion and Darwinism. He invented a fictional world without machines, but where there was a museum of machines, a pious ladies Bank where deposited money that was no good for shopping, or a very funny subject called Chowpok ("cowpox?)
Two anecdotes me help round out the memory of those days. The first has to do with the expectant first steps in School: "We arrived I was already wondering how is that all students end up being small" Miesitos? ... Is the case, the first day of school, after a pleasant introduction, Mies asked for a "card": - The project of a home in a week .... I strive to do what he thought most representative for me, was to look at a slope. I came from a particular geography and, to some traditions.
Mies, gentlemanly pondered the merits and defects of my humble work, but declared: "We believe that man can live more comfortably in a single level "(as the Pope spoke in the plural: Tink saw (we think)."
From that statement I kept saying no.
The second anecdote: Mies had a penetrating gaze. It was hard to keep the look. Thus one day I was checking my patio home model, lowering the side walls and looking at floor level through the house, when I get across the living room, "Mies's eye", like a cyclops: a battering ram that left me startled to burst.
In all these studies highlighted the continuing guidance of thinking architecture that call then "honest." witnessed the evolution to see how the ideas of Mies clean, consistent, remain as valid in principle.
Its territory, that we discover, was first understand the ideas, if you wanted to understand life. Although not remember hearing him at the time one of his sentences for the bronze: "Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks" So, I was skeptical to the emotional expressions of architecture, which led to many problems his contemporaries. I always left feeling that surfaced after his figure a certain condition of a monk, with some bread and water alone. A permanent position that contrasted with his partner and friend so many days, Ludwig Hilberseimer, our professor of City Planning. Theoretical tenacious, not forgive violations of his disciples, argumentative, controversial, chatty and humor, with a background different from that of Mies, like a good theory in that it did not reveal the inner wakefulness who are alone with their problems .
Over time, it seems very timely reflection of the Valencian architect, Alberto Burgos, which confirms some points today: "risking criticism for more than an exegete, I will contaminate the cleaning you deserve Mies, speculating with what I would call this point of inspiration for architects, where there are three types:
1. That copy without understanding (International Style, Phillip Johnson, etc.).
2. Those who inherit a minimalist feel merely send-less is more "
3. Those who are smart at the bottom of message and represent the world, assuming the rigor terrible to think clearly, even at the cost of making themselves vulnerable and flawed, or make sacrifices, in keeping with the internal ethics, learned from Mies in profound message. "
As said above, it has become easier today for why the contemporaries rebuild his image as strong, inspiring depth, kindness and inner beauty.
From my distant memory, I have operated as a balm to have brought here, in a perhaps somewhat unorthodox, some minor aspects of the career of a man of our time, robust, full of authority, and paradoxically, perhaps, by That same, contained in "the unfathomable universe of a great man alone."
Notes:
[1] "Conversations with Mies." Interbuild.
London 1959 [2] Mies asks "For us, the architecture was a matter of truth ... How can we learn, know and feel the truth?" ... ... Saint Thomas Aquinas said: - "It is clear that there is truth. For he who denies that there is truth, truth known to exist. If therefore there is no truth, it is true that truth does not exist "..
[3] "The order is the same and have it mixed according to their nature" ... St. Augustine.
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