Mies van der Rohe: the Centric and the Peripheric
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Author: Randall Ott
This volume presents anew the influential 20th-century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose reputation has unfairly languished. 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. 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 centre/periphery threads throughout his production, which gives nascent form to the profound societal tensions he sensed. A peculiar interleaving of the centric and the peripheric dominates his shaping of space.A new and integral Mies emerges, far different from previous interpretations and with enhanced relevance for our contemporary condition.
ISBN 9781961856370. Axiomatic Editions. hb. 360 pages. 300 colour ills. 27.9 x 22.9 cm.
not yet published
This volume presents anew the influential 20th-century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose reputation has unfairly languished. 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. 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 centre/periphery threads throughout his production, which gives nascent form to the profound societal tensions he sensed. A peculiar interleaving of the centric and the peripheric dominates his shaping of space.A new and integral Mies emerges, far different from previous interpretations and with enhanced relevance for our contemporary condition.
ISBN 9781961856370. Axiomatic Editions. hb. 360 pages. 300 colour ills. 27.9 x 22.9 cm.
not yet published