CONTEXT 181 : SEPTEMBER 2024 53 But not forgotten Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Villa Wolf in Gubin, history and reconstruction Edited by Dietrich Neumann, Dom publishers, 2023, 175 pages, 152 blackand-white, colour illustrations and line drawings, ISBN 978 3 869228 19 8, €28 The little-known Villa Wolf was Mies van der Rohe’s first modern building. Constructed at Gubin in 1925–27, close to the border between Germany and Poland, this remarkable house introduced a radical concept of spatial composition, where instead of individual rooms, interlocking spaces were to flow from one area to another in a loose and cubic arrangement. This idea was to reach its ultimate state in the design of the later Villa Tugendhat and Barcelona Pavilion. Although Mies himself was keen to publicise the Villa Wolf and engaged Arthur Köster, the finest interpreter of modern architecture, to photograph it, the brick-clad, flat-roofed house did not receive much attention. In part this was because its appearance was quickly overtaken by ‘white modernism’, which Mies himself adopted at the Weissenhof housing in Stuttgart in 1927. Its life was also short: abandoned by the Wolf family in February 1945, the house was seriously damaged by advancing Soviet troops and was then demolished, the bricks reused for post-war reconstruction in the town and the site turned into a small park. In recent years, interest in the lost villa has grown. The survival of most of the original drawings in the Mies archive at MOMA, New York, Köster’s photographs, and information from the Wolf family made it a promising subject for research by architects and historians who have collectively written this book. Six chapters by different authors explore the history and significance of the building, well-illustrated with plans and photographs, and analyse the practicality of reconstructing it. The final chapter by Dietrich Neumann, the book’s editor, considers the wider case for reconstructing modernist buildings, which has become a topic of intense debate in Germany. Neumann points to the commonly asked question of whether a justification for rebuilding something that was destroyed by the war that Hitler unleashed is morally defensible, since it offers a pretence that nothing happened. However, as time has passed, a more permissive approach has enabled several successful reconstruction projects, such as Gottfried Semper’s Opera House in Dresden, the Dom-Römer Quarter in Frankfurt and the timber-framed Guild Hall in Hildersheim. Reconstructing lost modernist buildings has been much less common and more prone to controversy. When Mies was asked to support a proposal to reconstruct his monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (1926), which was destroyed by the Nazis, he replied that he no longer wanted to deal with the ‘old stuff’. There was also division when Peter Palumbo attempted in 1982 to erect a tower designed by Mies for the Mansion House site in London in 1968. The recreation of the Barcelona Pavilion in 1986 is probably the most celebrated example, although its authenticity was a subject of vociferous debate. Critics pointed to the stone which came from a different quarry, stainless steel being used rather than nickel and concrete replacing painted wood, consequently describing the pavilion as a ‘life-size model’. Alison Smithson dismissed it as ‘merely a tourist attraction’. Others, however, unbothered by the slight differences in materials, welcomed the opportunity to experience Mies’s design in a convincing manner. Since then, other lost modern buildings have been recreated, including a pair of Walter Gropius’ houses for the Bauhaus masters at Dessau, while Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s ‘House for an Art Lover’ was built in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park in 1996, 95 years after it was designed. In completing his compelling case for the studied reconstruction of lost buildings, Neumann quotes the words of the architectural historian Winifred Nerdinger Villa Wolf (Photo: Arthur Köster/Museum of Modern Art, NY, colour rendering by Hassan Bagheri; and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
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