Mies’s Representations as Zeitwille: Großstadt between Impersonality and Autonomous Individual
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2019-10-19
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Conference Paper
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Abstract
The paper focuses on the relationship between zeitwille and impersonality in Mies van der Rohe’s “Baukunst und Zeitwille” (1924). “Zeitwille” expresses simultaneously a Schopenhauerian “will of the age” and a “will of time”. In “The Preconditions of Architectural Work” (1928), Mies claimed that “[t]he act of the autonomous individual becomes ever more important”. My objective is to shed light on the phenomenon of the inhabitants distancing from the chaos of the city, which was a particular effect of Mies’s interiors, associating this aspect of Mies’s way of representing interiors with his belief in the autonomous individual and his conviction that in “town and city living […] privacy is a very important requirement”. The ambiguity of his simultaneous interest in impersonality and the autonomous individual is pivotal for understanding the tension between the universality and individuality in his thought. Mies, on the one hand, he gives credence to the acts of the autonomous individual, but, on the other hand, rejects the endeavour to “express individuality in architecture”, as it becomes evident when he affirms that “[t]o try to express individuality in architecture is a complete misunderstanding of the problem”. In order to explain this contradiction, the paper shows how Mies drew a distinction between individuality and the autonomous individual, which crucial for understanding how he related großstadt to zeitwille. The strategies he employed in his representations will serve for demonstrating how Mies understood the relationship between großstadt and zeitwille. Mies believed in the existence of a universal and generally understandable visual language. His interiors function as fields within which the subjects are autonomous individuals, and as mechanisms permitting to overcome the tension characterising modern metropolis between the frenetic city and the private bourgeois dwelling. They could be perceived as fragments of the metropolis indoors. The way he represented his interiors, blending linear perspective and photomontage, intensifies the sensation of leaving behind the chaos of the metropolis. As Manfredo Tafuri claims, in “Theatre as a Virtual City: From Appia to the Totaltheater” (1977), the stagelike experience of Mies’s interiors of Mies is related to a specific attitude of the inhabitant towards the metropolis. Tafuri associates the sensation of “the impossibility of restoring ‘syntheses’” in Mies’s interiors with a specific kind of “negativeness” towards metropolis, which brings to mind what Georg Simmel called “blasé attitude”. The “positive and essential” “negation” to which Mies refers in a letter he addressed to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1947 is examined in relation to this “negativeness” towards metropolis highlighted by Tafuri.
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published
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ETH Zurich, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (GTA)
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International Conference "Mies van Der Rohe. The architecture of the city"
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Subject
Mies van der Rohe; History and theory of architecture; History and theory of urban design
Organisational unit
09643 - Avermaete, Tom / Avermaete, Tom
02655 - Netzwerk Stadt u. Landschaft ARCH u BAUG / Network City and Landscape ARCH and BAUG