From the drawn intention to the built reality. Mies in weissenhofsiedlung

Abstract

Mies van der Rohe is already an architect of international prestige when he became the director of Bauhaus in 1930. A contributing factor of this recognition was, to a great extent, his intervention as intellectual and artistic director in the exhibit of models of built houses in the Weissenhof settlement of Stuttgart in 1927, considered as the first moment in which modern architecture is expressed in a joint, international and coherent way. His built contribution to the exhibition, the linear block of rental housing is included in all the history of architecture manuals. However, very few places highlight the clear differences between the author's intentions, gathered in numerous drawings of the project and the built reality that can be contemplated in Stuttgart. Behind the main research of the project centred around an emerging idea of flexibility, still prevailing today, other architectural aspects of the proposal were finally relegated. Formal aspects that, in an in-depth analysis of the project, seem odd and are only understood from a comprehension of a hurried process that seemed to have forced certain renunciations. Relating to this hypothesis of an assumed imperfection, this article addresses a review of Mies' proposal in Weissenhofsiedlung.