Supersize Mies

Scary Mies 


HEE HEE! There's too many puns with Mies' name, I can't stop.

Oh my nuts it’s been busy today.

So I give my first modern public tour on Saturday and I’ve been a little lax about it, haven’t learned as much about our modern architects as I have about the historical stuff.

I’m not in love with Mies and am in love with Burnham.

So I’ve been reading up, trying to get a good pitch I can give to my group and I am astounded the more I learn. I’ll have to read more biographies.

BUT MAN! This Mies fellow is a trip. That picture scares the shit out of me.

But Mies was a teacher at a school called The Bauhaus in Germany in the early 1930’s and everyone was quite curious why Mies was fighting to stay there, to work it, to dodge the Nazi’s.

Mies was completely apolitical, he didn’t care who built his buildings, as long as his buildings were built. He designed buildings for the classical Nazi’s and they didn’t like his modernist work. The Nazi’s eventually found the Bauhaus to be way to avant garde and they closed it in like…1935.

But Mies was a freak! The only thing he wanted to teach his students was to design buildings just like he did. Exactly like he did. He wanted to push his influence and he did. Then he came to Chicago (Phillip Johnson brought him, originally a total Miesian follower, then a leader in the Postmodern movement) and he did the same thing here. He taught hundreds of architects to design buildings just like he did.

And they did, or they tried and we were in close danger of having the whole world look like a big black glass box.

More on Mies tomorrow, but man, this guy is intense.