Mies and his teaching venues. The triumph of architecture over function

Abstract

Mies van der Rohe started teaching architecture in 1930, the year he was appointed head of the Dessau Bauhaus. Political upheavals in Germany at that time obliged him to move to new premises and even to a new country: in 1938 he emigrated to the USA as head of the architecture department at the Armour Institute of Technology. In the twenty-eight years from his early days at the Bauhaus to his retirement from the school in Chicago, teaching was one of his main activities: classrooms were an ideal laboratory for experimenting with and thinking about architecture, and as a working architect he invariably brought his experience into the classroom. The aim of this paper is to examine the links between Mies’ teaching, thinking and architecture more closely in order to determine the connection between his teaching of architectural design and his work as an architect. However, within such a wide field, this paper focuses on a specific typology: the school of architecture. The hypothesis to be answered is: did Mies’ experience as a professor, and the professional and academic homologous projects in which he was involved, play a decisive role in the design of the only venue he built from scratch for teaching architecture: the open-plan Crown Hall? The research methodology employed consisted of revising, analysing and redrawing the different venues where Mies taught architectural design and comparing them with research projects about this typology. The ideas presented in dissertations directed by Mies about designing schools of architecture were of particular interest for this paper.