The Artless Word : Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art

The scarce hardcover edition.

Extensive scholarship sourced from Mies's writings and personal library. An incisive view into Mies's mind. Includes over 200 archival photographs and drawings.

Tight, clean copy. Former owners name on first free endpaper. Dust jacket comes in protective sleeve. Minimal lean to spine and minimal toning to page edges. Near fine.

"Mies van der Rohe's architecture has been well documented, yet his writings that contain the key to his thought and to understanding his work have been largely unexplored. From Mies's library - including his marginal notes - and from a body of writing that is surprisingly large for the self-described "unwilling author," Fritz Neumeyer reconstructs the metaphysical and philosophical inquiry on which Mies based his modernism.

A complex and powerfully integrated view of Mies's philosophy of building, including his American career, emerges from Neumeyer's investigation. He proposes, for instance, that the Catholic church architect and writer Rudolf Schwarz, the Bauhaus thinker Siegfried Ebeling, and the Catholic scholar Romano Guardini may have exerted an even greater influence on Mies than the frequently cited Plato, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, and he points to the ways in which the thinking of other architects, such as Peter Behrens and Hendrik Petrus Berlage, affected Mies's development.

Neumeyer also asserts that while Mies fervently believed in technology, in the notion that a building's form had to emerge from the nature of its materials, this view later shifted to include a personal ordering of what Mies regarded as spiritual determinants, resulting in a new unity of spirit and fact that was best exemplified in the Barcelona Pavilion. And he argues, in opposition to Bruno Zevi, that the conflict between proclassical and anticlassical concepts and ideas is always present in Mies's work, including his country houses and villas of the 1920s.

An extensive appendix presents all of the essential texts by Mies, published and unpublished, including some that have not previously appeared in English. Of special interest is the manuscript notebook from the Mies van der Rohe Archive in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, dating from the crucial years 1927-28 and published for the first time in this book.” -from the dust jacket flap

Text in English, translated by Mark Jarzombek.

7.1 x 11.6 inches