Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | EPFL Graph Search

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe est un architecte allemand naturalisé américain, né le à Aix-la-Chapelle (Allemagne) et mort le à Chicago (États-Unis). Après des débuts comme architecte pour Bruno Paul puis Peter Behrens, il fonde son cabinet d’architecture en 1912. Durant la première partie de sa carrière, il réalise de nombreuses villas, qui vont du style prussien, avec la maison Riehl, au modernisme, avec le Pavillon de l'Exposition internationale de 1929. Il dirige l’école du Bauhaus de 1930 à sa fermeture en 1933. L’arrivée au pouvoir du parti national-socialiste l’empêche de poursuivre sa carrière en Allemagne et il émigre en 1938 aux États-Unis, à Chicago où il devient directeur de l’Illinois Institute of Technology. Outre quelques projets de villas, telle la Farnsworth House, il réalise aux États-Unis ses édifices les plus monumentaux, parmi lesquels les immeubles 860 et 880 Lake Shore Drive, le Seagram Building et le Kluczynski Federal Building. Les plans et projets de Mies van d

Crisis and Renewal: From the National Commission for IIT to the MTCC by Rem Koolhaas

Tibor Bonaventura Pataky

Since the 1940s, the buildings added to the IIT Campus in Chicago had either been designed by Mies van der Rohe himself or largely informed by his example and teachings. With the Harold Leonard Stuart Building from 1971 by the SOM partner and former Mies student Myron Goldsmith, this era ends. On the main campus, new buildings were not added for more than thirty years, the institution facing a severe crisis by the early nineties. A National Commission, convened in 1993, instigated a period of substantial renewal, comprising a ten-year philanthropic campaign and a masterplan for the development of the campus. In 2003 two new major constructions were completed: the State Street Village dormitories by Helmut Jahn, and the McCormick Tribune Campus Center by OMA/Rem Koolhaas. Three decades after Mies’ death, the designs had to confront an environment which by then had acquired a canonical status in the history of modern architecture. The project for the MTCC in particular appears to reflect the approach and impact of the “American Mies” as much as the cultural shift separating the two eras. The paper reconstructs the events and dynamics that led to the campus’ renewal at the turn of the century, while focusing on the intricate reactivity underlying Koolhaas’ vision of the MTCC. The paper provides a close reading of the project, based on the study of the contexts pertinent to its conception: the Miesian legacy of the IIT Campus; the initiatives induced by the National Commission comprising the masterplan by Dirk Lohan and the competition in 1997-8 from which OMA’s project emerged; the architectural approach of the competing entries; and, the cultural climate of the first post-cold war decade, as reflected by Koolhaas’ research at Harvard and the publications he (co)-authored during this period.

2019

Docta Manus Drawing Structures, UE GC EPFL Lausanne

Raffael Baur, Miguel Fernández Ruiz, David Carlos Fernandez-Ordoñez Hernandez, Patricia Guaita

Drawing constitutes a very powerful and critical tool of conceptual design. Drawing constructs thought, it acts as a communication interface between the work and the mind and between different disciplines; it is the most powerful language of communication in the working together between architects and engineers. The UE ’Docta Manus - Drawing Structures’ introduces the basic drawing techniques: sketch, plan, section, elevation, axonometry, perspective. Based on these techniques, we further investigate analytical drawing methods capable of exploring structural concepts and their architectural solutions. Through hand drawing we analyze selected projects that embody an exemplary interplay of architecture and civil engineering, as e.g. the work of Mies van der Rohe, Luis Kahn / August Komendant, Jean Prouvé and Luigi Nervi. Our main focus lies on the load bearing structure and its tectonic and spatial articulation as common intersection between architecture and engineering. Through analysis, students enter into dialogue with construction in a direct way. They get a sense for the adequacy of tools and refinements of solutions. We investigate proportion, material innovation and tectonic articulation in relation to the structural idea and become aware of the importance of detail. Analysis takes apart and makes transparent the parameters and dependencies of the design process and opens the work into a condition of possibility. We draw by hand, as this is the most direct and immediate way of becoming aware of technique in relation to intention as it forces to take decisions. Drawing by hand is a cognitive process where the dynamic relation between doing and thinking is essential. That is why ‘the more you draw, the more you see’ and vice versa. The learning hand builds up tacit knowledge. The construction of points and lines on a sheet of paper sensitizes students to the notions of scale, size, proportion, transparency and composition; it makes them aware of the importance of detail as a key moment of construction, as a mediator relating a structure to the perceiving subject. This first publication shows a selection of 24 working drawings from an atelier of 30 students in civil engineering and architecture that took place during the autumn semester 2020 at EPFL. The students each analyzed one out of five selected projects of Mies van der Rohe, exploring adequate scales, drawing types and techniques to understand the project’s structure and construction principles. The drawings thus include dimensioning and fabrication notes up to catalogue of elements, mounting principles and sequence. The careful construction of layers of information by hand builds up into tactile working drawings that embody the spatial and tectonic ideas as well as the construction process of a structure. These ‘meta-drawings’ allow the observing eye to survey from one detail to another in a synchronous manner while integrating all information into a mental construction.

2021

A New Era of American Architectural Concrete: From Wright to Som

Roberto Gargiani

The affirmation of reinforced concrete and the kinds of space generated by its structures is one of the most fascinating and revolutionary chapters in the history of twentieth century architecture and engineering. This richly illustrated, three-volume essay, New Era of American Architectural Concrete: From Wright to SOM offers the first complete overview of all the most significant research conducted in concrete in the United States of America from 1940 to 1970, in which the greatest architects of the time were involved including Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolf, Eero Saarinen, Bertrand Goldberg, Mies van der Rohe, Myron Goldsmith, Marcel Breuer, Skidmore Owings & Merril, Walter Gropius, Roche-Dinkeloo, Minoru Yamasaki, Harrison & Abramovitz, William Pereira, Emery Roth & Sons, and others.

PPUR2020

Docta Manus Drawing Structures, UE GC EPFL Lausanne

Raffael Baur, Miguel Fernández Ruiz, David Carlos Fernandez-Ordoñez Hernandez, Patricia Guaita

2021