Dessau, June 6, 2013
Shortly after his entry to the 1921 Friedrichstrasse
competition, Mies produced a second project for a high-rise office building. It is, again, an experiment in glass. The plan is highly inflected, this time
not angular but undulating, a perimeter of tangential circles that more or less
extend to the property lines of what appears to be a tight urban plot. Two circles on opposite sides are
packed with stairs, elevators and other services.
If you ask me, this plan looks a little like a fish, with
the tail flattening towards the back of the site and the head projecting
forward, as the plot narrows.
This time there is a model. The structure is reduced to a series of (steel?) floorplates
thirty stories high, evenly spaced and with not even the slightest inflection
at the top or the bottom. There
are only a few columns at the center of the projecting circles. After that, the glass appears as a
continuous skin wrapping the structure.
There is an indication of very thin vertical mullions but otherwise the
job of the skin seems to be little more than to enclose the structure in all its nakedness.
The bride stripped bare...
Lest you think that the architect is engaging only in a geometric
or even technical exercise, the model includes its surrounding context in the
form of generic buildings of the old city (the bachelors?) about six stories
tall, with their characteristic fenestration and pointed roofs. It seems pretty clear that Mies is
here pondering the role of this new architecture within the fabric of the city.
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