By Claire Zimmerman
1. Mies is a particularly clear example of an architect who harnessed the ideologically progressive rhetoric of 1920s modernism to a politically indifferent practice of architecture. For example, his 1926 Liebknecht/ Luxembourg Monument was followed by work for the National Socialists from 1933-37. His writings during the same period return to a historically precedented idealism, from an early dabbling in 'radical functionalism'. See Fritz Neumeyer's book, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art (1986, transl., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991) for a discussion of this change in Mies's writing, and for a selection of the writings themselves; also see Richard Pommer, "Mies van der Rohe and the Political Ideology of the Modern Movement in Architecture," in Franz Schulze, ed., Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Critical Essays, 1986. Gropius also espoused the newness of modernist ideology without any deep commitment to its political affiliates.
2. In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer, Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner (New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Rizzoli, 1988).
3. K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
4. See Meyer's letter of protest to the …berburgermeister of Dessau, "Mein Hinauswurf aus dem Bauhaus," and Gropius's letter to Tomas Maldonado on Meyer, reprinted in the Publisher's epilogue, in Claude Schnaidt, Hannes Meyer: Bauten, Projekte, und Schriften (Teufen: 1965), p 100, 121.
5. All illustrations referred to in this essay can be found in the book under review, K. Michael Hays's Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject. Here, see pp. 142, 123.
6. A fuller citation: "The repetition of the blocks resulted in too much uniformity. Every natural thing was excluded: no tree or grassy area broke the monotony...the result was more a necropolis than a metropolis, a sterile landscape of asphalt and cement, inhuman in every aspect," quoted in Richard Pommer, "'More a Necropolis than a Metropolis' Ludwig Hilberseimer's Highrise City and Modern City Planning" in In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer, Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner (New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Rizzoli, 1988), p. 17.
7. See note 2.
8. K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, p. 273.
9. Ibid. p. 288.
10. See footnote 2 above. Pommer's apparent scorn for his subject leaves the reader wondering whether Pommer attributed Hilberseimer's prominence mainly to his association with Mies, thus reinscribing a very old stereotype.
11. On Hannes Meyer, see: Francesco Dal Co, "Hannes Meyer e la 'venerabile scuola di Dessau," introduction to Hannes Meyer, Architettura o rivoluzione (Padua: Marsilio, 1973); Claude Schnaidt, op. cit.; Martin Kieren, Hannes Meyer. Dokumente zur Fruehzeit Architektur-und Gestaltungsvrsuche 1919-1927. (Heiden: Verlag Arthur Niggli, 1990); Hannes Meyer 1889-1954: Architekt, Urbanist, Lehrer. (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1989); Jacques Gubler, Nationalisme et internationalisme dans l'architecture moderne de la Suisse (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1975). On Hilberseimer, see also Rassegna 8, no. 27 (September 1986), for a full issue on Hilberseimer.
12. See K. Michael Hays, "Odysseus and the Oarsmen, or, Mies's Abstraction Once Again," in Detlef Mertins, ed., The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994) p. 236.
13. Including Ludwig K. Hilberseimer, The New City (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944); The New Regional Pattern (Chicago: 1949); The Nature of Cities(Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1955).
14. "For Kracauer, as for Hilberseimer, capitalism is a stage in the process of demystification (Entzauberung) by which history, through unsentimental rationalization, continually dismantles those superstructural and naturalizing myths whose regressive effect is to prolong the notion of some unchanging and proprietary human essence." p. 264.
15. "But to dwell only on ambivalence, abstraction, and distraction is to miss the other, paradoxically related side of the Weimar-stimmung. Initially this could be characterized as a kind of pleasure or euphoria uniting the act of architectural re-presentation...with experiences of orgasmic pleasure, death, and the moment of self-obliteration. Roland Barthes describes this as an act of reading--or better, or rewriting--the doxologies of culture..." p. 266.