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| Vol. 24, No. 6 | Oct. 16, 1998 |
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| Vol. 24, No. 6 | Oct. 16, 1998 |
By Hannah Fairfield
To most, the villa outside Berlin was a mess of renovation debris-cracked floors, crumbling staircases, a sagging ceiling. But to 11 Columbia graduate students, it was an architectural treasure: the first house that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed and built.
As they explored the building, which was being restored to the original 1905 plans drawn by Mies when he was just 19 years old, the students felt like they were part of the building's living history.
The students were in Germany to research the early creations of Mies, one of the most renowned architects of the 20th Century. Their trip was an extension of a course in Columbia's Art History Department in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The students studied Mies' designs from the first 30 years of his career, before he began designing his famous skyscrapers, such as the Seagram building in midtown Manhattan.
By using previously unexamined early documents, the students in the seminar re-evaluated the popular account of Mies' ascent to the pinnacle of American skyscraper architecture. Rather than placing his early creations in the context of his later skyscraper designs, the seminar redefined their importance independent of the German �migr�'s later work.
"Graduate students in architectural history have so few chances to work with original drawings," said Barry Bergdoll, an associate professor of art history and archaeology. "This was an extraordinary opportunity for students to work with an exceptionally rich, but remarkably underexploited, collection."
To do this, students used the complete archive of Mies' drawings and correspondence, which he donated to the museum before his death. The course culminated in July with a trip to Germany and the Czech Republic for the students to study the surviving buildings and conduct their own research.
The course, which will be offered again this spring, was taught by Bergdoll and Terence Riley, the chief curator of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design. Riley graduated from Columbia's School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning in 1982, and was the director of Columbia's Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery for several years before joining MoMA in 1991.
Bergdoll and Riley taught the class at the museum, where students had full access to the collection of drawings, letters, building plans, models, even sketches on paper napkins. The entire Mies archive contains more than 20,000 items, making it the largest U.S. public collection of material on a single 20th-century architect.
"As Barry and I worked through the material ourselves, we found really interesting seminar topics-ones that we could steer toward the exhibition," said Riley, referring to MoMA's forthcoming End of Century exhibition titled Mies in Berlin, which will examine the early career of the architect who became a leader of the Bauhaus movement. Although most of the drawings and models from his 30 years in Germany were left behind when Mies emigrated to Chicago in 1938, they were later returned to him.
The students' travel expenses and some additional seminar costs were funded by a $179,000 grant from the Getty Grant Program. The major research and development grant was awarded to MoMA and Columbia University to foster collaboration for the Mies van der Rohe project during the two years before MoMA's exhibition. The grant will also fund travel for a select group of students from the spring '99 seminar, whose research will contribute to the exhibition.
The students, many of whom had never had access to original drawings before, were thrilled with the chance to do in-depth research in this little-studied area of Mies' work .
They researched in pairs: art history students with architecture students, because while the art history students knew how to read German, they did not all have experience reading architectural drawings, so the students relied on each other for translation.
"Seeing the buildings and talking to people in them was incredible-we got so much information we wouldn't otherwise have," said Sjoukje Van Der Meulen, an art history student originally from the Netherlands. "When we went to the Riehl Haus, it looked like it had been neglected for decades. It was terrible. But amidst the rubble, the new owners, who were renovating it back to the original, had prepared a dinner for us with cider and glowing candles to celebrate our arrival. It was so beautiful."
Though the course is primarily composed of Columbia architecture and art history students, students from the CUNY Graduate Center, NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, and, in the spring, the University of Pennsylvania, will be permitted to take the course.
The next Mies seminar, which both Bergdoll and Riley will teach again, will be more focused than the initial seminar, and will concentrate on Mies' relationship with landscape.
"His buildings are not autonomous, as previously thought," said Bergdoll. "In fact, they are embedded in the culture and the geography of the building's site." "It's amazing," he continued, gazing at the rows of Mies building slides he had illuminated on his lightbox, "how much of a different picture is starting to come into focus."