Architectural Immunities

One of the most puzzling anomalies in my ten years of studying the works and pomps of the Bauhaus in Weimar is what I call architectural immunity. My puzzlement began when I first read Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders’ review in “Form” (1927) of Mies van der Rohe’s apartments in Weissenhof—from the point of view of a woman and mother.

She deplored the excessive glass which generated pneumonia-inducing winds for the tykes crawling on the floor. And that same wind blew out the gas flame when you opened the kitchen door! She also deplored the design of the exterior staircases which had lethally large openings threatening small children’s safety. And where, this mother wondered, was a room to change wet clothes?

In short, Mies wasn’t designing a human habitation: he was making a Work of Art! Capital A.

It was his obsessive status panic as the son of a mason in Aachen! He never got over it. When he had to report in 1910, in Peter Behrens' Berlin office, to upper class apprentice Walter Gropius, he smoldered! Lüders was another matter. The first woman Ph.D (in Politics, 1910), she directed woman’s work in World War I, expanding her responsibilities to child care, with their mothers in defense factories. She became a member of the Weimar Republic’s first parliament. (Alas, Hitler eventually jailed her twice for two much lip! Her inspiring autobiography is entitled, “Never Fear!”)

It took the Bundestag a long time to honor her (2005) by naming its new library on the Spree after her. The parochial paternalism of Kinder, Kirche, and Kuche doesn’t die easily!

But Mies succumbed in his hyperaestheticism to what I call the Crystal Palace Syndrome. That Cathedral of Industrialism just had to dazzle tourists for the short run of that first World’s Fair in 1851 London to serve it purpose. But its Dazzle became a bad habit! The Barcelona Pavilion (1928) was his first exemplar, but, alas, not his last.

When he built a weekend retreat in Plano, IL for his Chicago girlfriend, Dr. Farnsworth, everything was hunky-dory until their romance cooled—and she took him to court for excess energy costs: too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter! She lost. (And so did we all, lovers of great architecture.) For decades, various inheritors of the property tried to tame it. To no avail. Recently it was “demoted” to a Visitors Center, dedicated to Mies architectural genius!

Shortly after Corbusier’s concrete flat at Weissenhof suffered the same dishonor! (Mies wanted to establish his international rep by that cluster of over a score of Modernists outside Stuttgart.) Across the street was another pioneer settlement, the Friedrich Ebert Houses, sponsored by the local Social Democrat Party. They tried to collaborate with him on water and waste issues, but he told them to take a hike! He was after a rep not a communal neighborhood!

His last big mistake was the New National Gallery in Berlin. It amused me to learn from a visiting Cuban architectural historian that it was originally designed in concrete as a Bacardi rum HQ. But Fidel said NO! So Mies switched to steel in Berlin. Its dazzling top floor doesn’t work for lack of light and temperature control—unless you’re sponsoring a Harley Davidson bike exhibit. Incidentally, Phillip C. Johnson (a Mies buff if ever there was one) created his own famous Glass House in Connecticut which has just achieved National Heritage status. But Witold Rybcynski warns us in SLATE that it’s also a hot killer. (And only $100 a visit.)

Which brings us to Walter Gropius. In 1926, “His” Dessau complex had just opened. (How much of that design was his, or Adolf Meyer’s, his “silent partner”, or Ernst Neufert’s, the Bauleiter,we’ll never know.) But Johnson was cruising Europe, looking for structures that would eventually establish “his” International Style at MOMA, NEW YORK. Alfred Barr, Jr., the soon to be anointed director of MOMA (1929), was cruising Berlin looking for Modernists in painting and sculpture.

Phillip phoned him excitedly from Dessau to tell him he had just seen the greatest new modern building. He should have talked first to the professors and students! They found it freezing in the winter, a hot box in the summer. Even today, as I’ve overnighted sentimentally in the minihotel of the old Atelier House, I still find its temperatures erratic. It’s the old Glass Palace Syndrome all over again!

(Heh, it’s only 40 euros a couple.) Come to think of it, Gropius’s first big work (1911-4), the Fagus shoelast factory is pure GPS. He was praised for having the first glass wall that curved around its square corners!

As a native Detroiter who earned his Ph.D.fees working in Albert Kahn’s auto factories, I remember he used to sneer at the Bauhaus architects as “the Glass House boys”! In 1941 he convened a conference on defense factory architecture at the University of Michigan (he had designed the major buildings there!) for the Saarinens, Eliel and Eero, and Mies and Pius (as they nicknamed him).

He chided them for the backasswards ways they designed factories: make fancy GPS fronts and then stuff in the crucial production works later. And he teased them by exaggerating that architecture was 90% business and 10% ART! During this 90th anniversary orgy of puffery about the Bauhaus, I flinch as a man who first learned architecture by visiting the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit at the filiopietism of the German press about the Bauhaus as the greatest art school of the twentieth century! It may have had the greatest vision (fusing art and technology to create good design for the working classes).

But it achievements were spotty and often contradictory. It was indeed a Grand Flop! And in the Hoopla over its founding 90 years, the idealism of Gropius has been trumped by 21st century Tourism!

But architectural immunities don’t end with the Bauhaus. Take my favorite building of all, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Falling Water”(1938). On my first glorious visit (1982), I was puzzled by the fact that I, a mere 5’8’’, had to scrunch down to go through the doors. Then I quickly recalled FLW was a Squirt, who wore a porkpie hat and high heels to dissimulate! His Nibs was the module. Then I discovered that the hearth at the heart of this home never got hot enough to cook the food in its giant container. Nor indeed could the crane move that container commodiously! Hmm.

I recalled that when he first showed his design to the department store magnate who was his client, he asked Wright if he shouldn’t have his engineers check Wright’s math. The genius was outraged! Now it turns out that as a Pennsylvania taxpayer I’m on the hook for keeping Fallingwater's cantilevers from falling into the waters! I have seen estimates from $11-23 millions. And it was not his only booboo. When I was making a pious USAirways odyssey at Taliesin West in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Wisconsin Taliesin, I was puzzled by stretches of concrete painted to look like redwood!

Bruce Pfeiffer Brooks explained that Wright was dazzled by the way redwood irrigation sluices looked when wet. Alas, without water, the redwood planks simply deliquesced under the hot Scottsdale sun! So he had a substitute concrete and paint it!

But my favorite “immunity” story concerns Alvar Aalto, the great Finnish humanist. I was on another pious odyssey, this time in honor of the centennial of his birth, 1998. Whenever I overnight in Helsinki, I take a constitutional around his masterpiece, Finlandia. To my horror, the travertine cladding had been completely removed. I tracked down a hardhat to find out why. Easy, travertine can’t take Finnish winters. And frozen water seepages were dropping dangerous chards on tourists! Can’t have that. But the Finns are a sentimental folk.

It would insult the centenarian if they used granite, ideal for the cold. So they settled for thicker slices of travertine and a better adhesive, even though down the road they knew they’d have to do it over. After breakfast, I hiked over to the Finnish Museum of Architecture, where they were holding a centennial exhibition.

The epigraph was pure Aalto: NEVER FORGET THAT ARCHITECTS MAKE MISTAKES. It should be over the main portal of every architecture school. To avoid the GCS and other architectural goofs!