Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Visions

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The plans, the elevations of town and country houses must be as varied as the people; none are alike, yet they are all composed in the same way: the layouts differ only in the greater or lesser; they are relative to the fortune that dictates them. Nomenclature places them according to the order of needs: in an art where the planners have no rights other than those acquired by paying for the material, the discerning man must guide the Architect; but if he hinders his means, he robs posterity of productions that could have justified his expense by illuminating his century.

Exterior decorations come in large and small dimensions. We will not go into tedious details that could make the description languish; it is enough, to be in accordance with natural laws, to prove that decoration belongs to everyone; in vain have prejudices concentrated it exclusively in the class of those who occupy high positions, dignities, and public offices.

Anyone who seeks the care of a skilled artist has an equal right to a monument of taste. [130]

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux

The nineteenth century—to borrow the Surrealists’ terms—is the set of noises that invades our dream, and which we interpret on awaking.

Walter Benjamin

While in prison, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, prodigy of the Enlightenment, architect of the ancien régime, who designed and built spartan neoclassical buildings for the monarchy, for the aristocracy, for the wealthy that captured the spirit of the times, who was arrested during the Reign of Terror, continued working on a book he had begun some years before that contained his thoughts on his work, on architecture itself, and more, along with drawings of his projects, realized, envisioned, and plans for a whole town, partly built, wholly idealistic, from which I draw the image and text of one of his maisons de campagne, country houses, above. The book appeared in 1804 under the title L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation—Architecture Considered in Relation to Art, Mores, and Legislation. The title and his opening words give a sense of his exalted belief in architecture, in himself, the range of his ambition, the scope of his desires:

Amidst the various occupations, which can be judged by the extent of the work I present to the nations; amidst the turmoil that has tested my perseverance; in the face of the persecutions inseparable from the public expression of great ideas, and the passions that have worn down my resolve; almost constantly subjected to narrow calculations, to timid ambitions, to fickle wills that stifle the impulses of genius, I will not offer my readers those projects that fade into the vagueness of imaginary schemes, or whose terrifying potentiality prevents any progress toward their execution.

Convinced that by condensing the annals of time, and by gathering together the models and principles that art has bequeathed to us, I can imbue it with a creative force that will allow it to produce great works, and thus expand its domain and its glory, I have gathered, in a few days of reading, all the riches of the centuries that preceded us. [1]

I have no idea what he is talking about and I’m not sure he does, either, though I wonder about the terrifying potential of the work he does not offer. Nor do I know what possessed me to make this model of his odd country house, designed, he tells us, to follow the laws of nature, to illuminate his century, long past, but which perhaps might yet shed light on my own.

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Mies, the Dexel House, Artificial Intelligence: De Profundis, Flitting on the Surface

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Out of the depths I have cried to You, O Lord
Lord, hear my voice!
Let Your ears be attentive
To the voice of my supplications.

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The times are bleak, solutions appear beyond us, miracles lie around the corner. We live in an age of bottomless trepidation and unbounded wonder. Each is exhilarating in its own way, both are given equal play without resolution. The two can be related, one feeding the other: the greater our desperation, the greater our projection of hope. There is a kind of exhilaration in utter helplessness that propels us beyond ourselves, to faith. Of late our faith—along with vast computing resources and countless billions—has been invested in artificial intelligence, which we hope will save us, transform us in ways we cannot even fathom.

Mies van der Rohe’s Dexel House, commissioned by artist Walter Dexel, 1925, unbuilt, would have been his first modern construction. Not much is known about it and Mies left us almost nothing beyond a handful of quick, rough sketches. For my brief, tentative essay, Mies van der Rohe: Haus Dexel, I built a model based on the first image, above, shown in the second. I wanted to see what AI could do and went to ChatGPT with great anticipation, some fear. I simply entered the prompt “Mies van der Rohe Dexel House” and in seconds got a full, impressive-looking report that ended with this conclusion:

Mies van der Rohe’s Dexel House was a conceptual laboratory—critical stepping stone in his architectural evolution. Though never built, it encapsulates his shift from classical composition to modernist abstraction, from enclosed space to defined space. It is one of the clearest articulations of his exploration into how form, space, and modern life could converge—not through ornament or tradition, but through clarity, geometry, and logic.

Would you like a diagram showing how the spatial volumes interact in the design?

I said I did, and got the third image. The conclusion, for all its ambition, is wholly abstract, dubious, and borders on nonsense. The drawing fits it well. It makes no sense as a house at all and bears marginal connection to the Dexel House, to anything Mies ever designed or built, to architectural design itself.

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Mies van der Rohe: Haus Dexel

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The Dexel case then somehow became a standing expression for anything that gold old Mies had absolutely no desire to work on. . . . We do not want to have another Dexel!

Werner Graeff

It has always happened this way. I’ve made several models of Mies’s early work—the pieces I use accommodate it fairly well—and each time I was just looking for an idle diversion, a simple way to pass the time with structures that themselves appear direct and simple. We all need on occasion to nail down some certainty in our lives that doesn’t tax us. Or maybe we need to relearn what we too often forget, that simple, if it has any value, is never simple. At any rate, with each building I spent much time with questions and indecision, entering extended reflection that was meaningful, vitalizing, but that did not always land. Something similar may have happened with Mies in the Dexel House.

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Mies van der Rohe: Monument to the November Revolution/ November 2024

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Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein

Mies van der Rohe’s Monument to the November Revolution, 1926, a memorial to German political martyrs, is a stark assemblage of brick masses, almost brutal in execution but enigmatic in its composition. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is, a stack of rough brick masses, yet it leads to questions you aren’t sure how to phrase, doubts about any answers. Still, it maintains balance and composure in spite of the ambiguity, or, better, because of its ability to recognize, to negotiate it.

My essay on his Brick Country House, built a few years before, led to curiosity about the monument, and I completed the model during our November election, a way to engage myself, fight despondence. Mood here is dark, merely personal, mindless and oblivious, with deep undercurrents of the vindictive, illuminated only by the brightness of shallow simplicities that can only lead to more conflict. The man who exhausted our capacity for outrage has been given a fresh start. We have every reason to expect the worst.

Assembling bricks laid a century ago and trying to find their order put the past in my hands and moved me to thoughts of the present. There are similarities, ominous familiarity. In both periods a democratic state is stressed, brought to peril by a process that appears to be inexorable. As I built, moved blocks in my mind, looked back, tried to look forward, history felt like nothing more than a series of discontinuous fractures where I could gain no purchase. Now, as then in Germany the last years of its republic, we have been bombarded with toxic nonsense, and it is hard to find the words. Thought, language have degraded past meaning.

A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. 

Timothy Snyder

Making the model itself was difficult for many reasons, and I struggled to comprehend Mies’s decisions and represent them. But I had to involve myself somewhere, do something with my hands, my head. The process was not wholly restorative but at least I gained a measure of commitment and completion, however rough my model, how uncertain I remained about building it throughout. Construction is one proof of our existence that may yet help us look ahead, keep hope in suspension for another time. At the very least we must not put aside, not surrender, not forget, but remember. Remembering is a matter of keeping the past, the present alive.

I was, I am, I will be

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Mies van der Rohe: The Brick Country House/According to Plan

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We know Mies van der Rohe’s project the Brick Country House, 1924, only through photographs of a perspective drawing and a ground floor plan, often paired together, and a few other drawings based on them that followed. Despite appearances they don’t align and the perspective drawing is based on a substantially different plan than the one given, as I explain in Mies van der Rohe: Meditations on a Plan. There I argue both, despite their differences, are complete and compelling in their own ways, providing two different takes of what Mies might have had in mind. In Mies van der Rohe: The Brick Country House Revisited/Revised I attempted a model that matched the perspective drawing, using a revised plan I guessed at.

Here I attempt one that sticks to the original plan. And I think I will finally give my project a rest. It has perplexed me for years, as it has others, and I can’t go further. Some problems—many?—most?—are better left open, unresolved.

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Mies van der Rohe: The Brick Country House Revisited/Revised

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I have long wondered what Mies van der Rohe’s Brick Country House might look like in actual three dimensions, wanting to make a model I could walk around and view from all angles, then see where that took me.

It exists only as a perspective drawing

and a ground floor plan, both made a century ago, both often presented together, both of which tell us little about the second floor, beyond what we see.

I thought if I analyzed the plan carefully enough, long enough, I might come up with an inspiration that would provide a central concept that, once applied, would reveal the structure of the rest, unseen. I discovered the opposite, that there is no central concept. Rather the design, as much of it as we are given, depends upon being active and unpredictable. Order is a point of departure. I also studied his other houses of the time to get ideas—the Concrete Country House, the Dexel House, the Eliat House, the Krefeld Villas, the Tugendhat House, still more, all in varying degrees of completion and conception—all of them similar only in how different they all are. Mies is experimenting with different sites, different programs, different ideas. The only conclusion I could make is that the closer he came to a final, built version, the more compromises he had to make. That is not a problem with this house, which was never built. Mies had complete freedom.

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Six Persimmons

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Summer 2021

Some stray event, a random thought touched a memory the other day, an image. I can’t recall where or when I first saw it. I found a copy online, put it on my desktop, and just gazed. It touched me lightly, deeply, taking me outside myself, back within in ways I have yet to define or explain. I keep looking at it but the picture deflects all reason, focused sight, insight, returning me only to what it is, a picture of six persimmons.

An essay with marginal connection to architecture. I make this case, however, that architecture, like all cultural efforts, should depend upon close inspection of the world and some base of reflection—and realize it doesn’t have all the answers.

Go to full essay.

Mies van der Rohe: Meditations on a Plan

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Mies conceived of building as arising out of a field of tension that consisted of intrinsic lawfulness on one hand and creative freedom on the other. It should afford the “required privacy combined with the freedom of open room forms” and provide a “defining” but not a “confining space” suitable for contemporary living. Behind this concept of space and architecture that defined “building” in a philosophical sense as a “giving form to reality” stood for Mies the question of the “value and dignity of human existence,” namely: “Is the world as it presents itself bearable for man? . . . . Can it be shaped so as to be worthwhile to live in?”

Neumeyer

For decades I have been moved by Mies van der Rohe’s Brick Country House without knowing why. Not knowing why may be a large part of the attraction, along with a sense of release when I look again at the drawings, also without knowing why, or where, but without feeling I have left the ground. But it is open and direct about what it is, factual, honest, as Mies would have it. This honesty may be its greatest strength, its largest mystery.

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Barcelona Pavilion: Plan I

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I got curious. I ran across an early plan for Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and wondered what it might look like in three dimensions, thus this model. I entered the project with expectations of discovering a trace of some buried idea unknown to us all these years that, once unearthed, might lead to full structural understanding of the Pavilion as built, to larger insight into the mind of Mies, revelation into the mind of architecture, the mind of the world itself, all of which, of course, is absurd.

We do that too much, think we need to look beneath the surface and raise what most of us cannot see and fit it into some critical structure within which we should align ourselves, without which we cannot understand ourselves and move forward.

Really, the differences between the plan and the final construction are not great. Then again, I make this tentative conclusion, that our salvation depends on attention to small things, to what lies obvious before us, once seen clearly, felt within, once absorbed. Mies said similar. More tentatively, I suggest there are no great revelations and we need to find ways to manage that fact, which the Pavilion does marvelously.

The evidence for the process of planning and construction, about a year, up to its opening at the Barcelona exposition in 1929, is sketchy. Models, drawings, and notes were lost or discarded; Allied bombing destroyed official German records of the exhibition. Some of Mies’s own recollections decades later do not fit the available evidence, and the plan Werner Blaser used in his seminal monograph, Mies Van Der Rohe: The Art of Structure, 1965, created around that time in Mies’s Chicago studio, is inaccurate in several key aspects. A few original sketches have survived, however, along with three floor plans perhaps in sequence that bear the German workshop’s stamp. These give close attention to layout and proportions, of which the above is the first. Along with them, a final plan, created after 1929, widely circulated, its accuracy later questioned as well. And once the exhibition was over, the Pavilion was demolished and scrapped for parts. I take Plan I—Wolf Tegethoff’s designation—and almost all factual information from his careful and thorough study in Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses.

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