With war brewing in Europe in 1939, a Glencoe businesswoman reported to the FBI that she’d discovered a Nazi plot at a Midwestern summer resort.
“I’ve just returned from Pine Lake Lodge, Wisconsin and while there was very suspicious of four Germans who were staying there,” she wrote the feds. “They spoke nothing but German and spent their time over drawings. I may be wrong but they impressed me as spies, perhaps drawing plans of our country for the woman to take back to Germany.”
The German speakers were an older man who “was supposed to be a marvelous architect,” a young woman and two other men, she said. To establish her credentials for counterespionage work, the Glencoe woman noted she’d just seen the movie “Confessions of a Nazi Spy.”
After an eight-month investigation, the FBI concluded that the older German had come to the U.S. because of Adolf Hitler, but not in the way the Glencoe woman imagined.
An associate of the man told FBI agents that “he did not hesitate to express his dislike for the Hitler regime, and stated that it had practically ruined him financially in Germany.”
The snoop from suburbia got one thing right: The older man was, indeed, a celebrated designer of buildings: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose fame had preceded his arrival two years earlier in the United States. He was newly hired to head the architecture department at the Armour Institute of Technology on Chicago’s South Side. One of the young men was his student, and the other his administrative assistant. The woman was a German colleague visiting the States.
Between World Wars I and II, Germany was on a cultural roller coaster, and Mies rode it. A decade of creative freedom was followed by brutal repression under the Nazis. In the 1920s, actress Marlene Dietrich, clad in fishnet stockings, bared her sexuality on Germany’s silver screen, and Mies the architect proposed leaving the nation’s tall buildings naked.
“Only in the course of their construction do skyscrapers show their bold, structural character, and then the impression made by their soaring skeletal frames is overwhelming,” he said in a magazine article. “On the other hand, when the facades are later covered with masonry this impression is destroyed.”
But while he illustrated his vision of structural austerity with masterful renderings, Mies wasn’t able to make it a reality in Europe. That opportunity came only in Chicago, when he was commissioned to design the Promontory Apartments on South Shore Drive. Currently, it is up for a landmark designation as the ultimate ancestor of the glass-and-steel towers that define urban skylines on every continent.
But that isn’t why Mies and his students were bending over a drafting table in Wisconsin in 1939. (Shortly thereafter, Hitler invaded Poland, and construction of skyscrapers was put on hold until after World War II.) Mies was commissioned to design a campus for the Armour Institute and the Lewis Institute, which were merging, and a Chicago architect and his lawyer had enabled Mies and his young associates to spend a working vacation at Pine Lake Lodge.
“Leisure hours were cheerfully free of bourgeois constraints,” reported Mies’ biographers Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst. “Liquor was readily available, and swimming was comfortably in the nude.”
The name of the new institution for which they were planning — the Illinois Institute of Technology — must have resonated with Mies.
He knew that some people, especially the cultivated, fear technology, seeing it as soulless and architecture as art. But that was a false dichotomy, Mies explained in a 1950 speech to a crowd at IIT: “Wherever technology reaches its real fulfillment, it transcends into architecture.”
Accordingly, his design for IIT looked more like a factory district than the ivy-covered, neo-Gothic campus that was then standard issue for American colleges. IIT’s buildings were sheathed in modules of glass and buff-colored brick framed by black structural steel.
Mies’ curriculum was similarly unique. Architects generally made pretty pictures, then figured out how to build them, or handed off the problem to an engineer. Mies thought it should be the other way around. He had never studied architecture, though IIT’s was the second architectural program he’d headed. He had been the director of the Bauhaus, the famed cradle of modern design shuttered by the Nazis in 1933.
Mies had a tradesman’s education. He lettered cemetery monuments for his father, a stonemason, and later was a bricklayer. He apprenticed as a draftsman in a stucco factory that produced ornamental ceiling decorations. “Even now I can draw cartouches with my eyes closed,” he later recalled.
His students took a fixed sequence of courses that mimicked apprenticeships: drawing, construction, function, proportion and special relations. “I believe architecture has little or nothing to do with the invention of interesting forms or with personal whims,” Mies said, as quoted in the Tribune in 1970.
That philosophy was questioned by an IIT student who was the granddaughter of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. “Mies! Why are we allowed so little self-expression?” she asked him, according to a 1943 Tribune article.
Handing her a paper and a pencil, he asked her to write her name and she did.
“There is a matter of self-expression,” Mies said. “First you learned the ABCs. Then you learned to write. The way you write you learned last of all. So it is with architecture.”
She must have accepted Mies’ answer. The Tribune article noted that she graduated from IIT.
One of the young men who worked with Mies at the Pine Lake Lodge in 1939 stayed with him even longer. George Danforth started off as Mies’ student and later became a professor at IIT. When Mies stepped down in 1958, Danforth succeeded him as chairman of the architecture department.
The other young man who helped Mies in Wisconsin was John Barney Rodgers. Having studied at the Bauhaus, he spoke German, and as Mies didn’t speak English, translated for him at IIT. Rodgers became a partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architecture firm notable for spare-and-simple buildings echoing Mies’ mantra: “Less is more.”
Mies went on to finally realize his skyscraper vision in the 21-story Promontory Apartments. “It will have no outside ornamentation,” the Tribune noted when the project was announced in 1947. “However, it will have an unusual amount of window space.”
The adjective “unusual” would hardly apply to the Miesian skyscrapers that followed — neither the ones he or his students designed, nor those produced by Skidmore and the legion of architectural firms that adopted his method. Glass towers became the urban norm.
“When you use logic and reason on a plan and you have to build a 50-story building, you just put one (component) on top of another as straight as you can,” Meis told a Tribune reporter the year before he died in 1969.
The fourth member of the team that planned the IIT campus during August 1939 was Lilly Reich. In 1932, Mies asked her to teach at the Bauhaus and direct its interior design workshop. They were already constant companions, professionally and personally. Mies and his wife were separated though never divorced.
Trained as a furniture designer, Reich pioneered the use of tubular steel, which she employed in furnishings for several residences that Mies designed in the interwar years. Their most famous collaboration was the Barcelona chair with its gentle, intersecting curves. Premiering at the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition of 1929 — which Reich and Mies designed — the Barcelona chair became an icon of modern design and remains in production today.
Reich returned to Germany in 1939. She was drafted into a military engineering unit during World War II, but not before securing the survival of 3,000 of Mies’ drawings. She died in 1947, having scarcely reestablished her practice.
In a letter she sent Mies a year after her return to Germany, Reich wrote: “I am sad that I have received only the slightest word from you in the last weeks, and that pertaining solely to business affairs. … I am happy that you have friends now, and it comforts me somewhat that I was once with you over there.”
Schulze and Windhorst, Mies’ biographers, think he decided to end his relationship with Reich before she left the U.S. Artistic freedom precluded emotional entanglements.
For Mies, as they put it: “Loneliness was the price of the quest.”
rgrossman@chicagotribune.com
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